The Yellow Wallpaper is a highly regarded 1892 short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which is also regarded as a good early example of both feminist literature and body horror. The influence of the work across modern feminist horror can be found everywhere if you know to look, almost like the lurid titular wallpaper itself.
As such, it’s an interesting choice for a six-person dance show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. To our delight, however, the visceral choreography fits perfectly with Gilman’s original tale. The story itself is pretty simple; our protagonist is a woman suffering from what we would now call post-partum depression, and her idiot husband (who is also a doctor) decides that the best way to cure this is to confine her to the single floor of a rotting mansion with hideous wallpaper. The original story is told through an unreliable narrator, journal style. This take is told through dance, lighting and just enough acting.
The show achieves this feat of story-telling by starting off with excerpts from the protagonist’s hidden journal, and each significant twist and turn of the story is enhanced by the addition of dance. The wallpaper itself (which moves and mutates) is extremely well realised, and there are moments when performance, lighting and sound combine to create a genuinely alarming and suffocating vibe, bringing the audience face-to-face with the horror the protagonist faces.
The character work is equally brilliant. The slowly building suspicion of the husband and his ‘sister’, the decline of our protagonist and so on work incredibly well. It’s impossible to see this without feeling palpable frustration at the patriarchy and the arrogance of the establishment.
A clever take on a classic work. A must for those who take their horror seriously, and a delight for word nerds of all kinds. Simply brilliant.
