Weve all imagined monsters in the bedroom at some point, seen eyes looking out at us from dark corners, and so the claustrophobic horror story of a woman sent mad by a malevolent creature in the wallpaper should resonate with all of us. However this disjointed production sadly fails to tap into these basic fears. Somewhere between dance and straight theatre this is a production which misses on both levels because it has been unable to successfully merge the two.
Charlotte has been locked in an old nursery papered in disturbing yellow wallpaper which has been slowly decaying over years of child's play and then neglect. Her husband John and her nurse, Jennie, keep her in complete isolation seemingly for her own good but with disastrous consequences. Within the wallpaper there is a woman who begins to exert her hypnotic and malignant effect on Charlotte and we watch as our heroine descends into madness.
Starring two graduates of Laban, School of Contemporary Dance, and with an original sound composition I was expecting much from this Gothic tale. I wanted to see the wallpaper moving and alive, the woman manipulating it, being it and slowly beginning to permeate Charlottes reality and sanity. Sadly however, instead of this malleable substance what is presented are dull mustard hangings that look dead to the eye and totally spiritless.
As Charlotte sits on her bed writing her diary (with her thoughts somewhat gratingly played in voice over) it is slowly revealed that there is a woman camouflaged in matching fabric and rolled up in the ripped off cuttings. This is a sinister initial image, however once untangled she simply moves in front of the hangings and dances there for the rest of the piece making her a seemingly separate entity from the paper, the matching fabric doing nothing but giving a basic linking of the two. This makes it hard to feel the claustrophobic nature of this work, or that the walls are literally closing in on Charlotte, either physically or metaphysically.
The acting sections which pepper the plot are stuttered and for the most part very slow. This is a real shame because Emmerline Cresswell (Charlotte) and Joanne Clark (the woman in the wallpaper) do have some beautiful moments of duet with some brilliantly frenetic and wild choreography which plays with repetition and speaks volumes about the disquieting heart of this story. The musical score is at times whimsical, at times frantic, at times mournful, but always beautifully establishing the feeling of air which is heavy with ghosts and was intrinsic in creating whatever atmosphere was permeating the stage. Any sense of dread was immediately dispelled however throughout the acting sections and I wish that they had simply left the storytelling to the virtuosity of this choreography and the chillingly emotive musical score and not attempted to bring scenes into it at all.
Although there a fleeting moments when the true potential of this piece comes through it is hard not to feel that by sticking too closely to text, and by not fully exploring the practicalities of the yellow wallpaper itself a great opportunity has been lost and what is left is not so much disturbing as dull.
