THEATRE
The Yellow Wallpaper
Oran Mor, Glasgow
Mary Brennan
THREE STARS
This production's Victorian style of dress and certain turns of phrase are the only obvious clues to the period when American writer, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, penned The Yellow Wallpaper (1892). You could locate the piece in medieval times or in the present day and it would still hold up because there's a timeless edge to Gilman's harrowingly spare narrative of how post-natal depression, compounded by loneliness and a lack of understanding, can take an exhausted mind to the brink of total breakdown.
There are, nonetheless, interesting challenges in transferring Gilman's perceptions to the stage: as Charlotte (Hannah Donaldson) becomes increasingly obsessed by the traceries on the hideous yellow wallpaper that surrounds her, they come alive under her gaze until she fancies - not inappropriately - there's a woman trapped behind them.
Sandy Nelson's adaptation responds to the fevered descriptions in Gilman's text by making that figment a reality in the form of dancer Katie Armstrong. While John (Nelson also plays Charlotte's no-nonsense physician husband) pops pills into his vulnerable wife - a control mechanism, like his insistence on her not writing or seeing friends - Armstrong's dishevelled look-alike version of Charlotte creeps ever more centre-stage, her presence accentuated by an atmospheric sound-score.
By the end, Charlotte is literally in the grip of her delusions: drawn into a symbolic-symbiotic dance duet where Charlotte's internal struggles to hold onto her sense of self are given fierce physicality. Perhaps what unsettles most is the air of everyday decency that Nelson and Donaldson shade into their characters so that his suppression of her ambitions, her instincts about her illness, her very identity, is expressed as loving concern rather than the abuse it is. Gilman's 6000 words remain a potent cri de coeur, still relevant a century on.
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