The Yellow Wallpaper

Reviewer Helen Thomson
March 21, 2005

By Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Adapted by Peter Evans and Anita Hegh
Directed by Peter Evans
The Storeroom, North Fitzroy
Until April 3

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's masterpiece The Yellow Wallpaper was semi-autobiographical, its radicalism not always understood in 1892 when it was first published. It is a study of madness, but specifically female madness, suggesting that 19th-century patriarchy was the cause of women's loss of sanity.

Twentieth-century feminism rescued the novella from obscurity, and there have been a number of stage adaptations of it, dramatising the complex struggle in one woman's mind.

The woman who speaks to us only obscurely recognises that conforming to the stereotype of ideal womanhood of the time is the very cause of her "nervous depression". She is faced with the terrible dilemma of being good and mad, or bad and sane.

Anita Hegh is engaging and intriguing as the woman confined to the room papered with a "sickly yellow" wallpaper, new mother and wife of John, the kindly physician husband who rules her like a child.

Her performance is studied and subtle, moving from the carefully schooled enunciation of a lady to the uninhibited growl of a creature who has dragged herself around the hateful, yellow walls of her prison.

She beautifully captures the frightening intimacy with which the woman records the thoughts that have been forbidden, hiding the written account of her experiences from the suspicious eyes of husband/doctor, but speaking them to us. Her deterioration is made all the more heartbreaking by her struggle to maintain the fiction of the "good" wife, mother, sister-in-law and patient.

Luke Hails' skilful and atmospheric lighting helps suggest the subtle progression from bewilderment to madness, as does Hegh's timing and use of silence, as well as a carefully restricted and choreographed set of movements.

Gilman's text requires careful reading, as she balances the first-person experiences of gradual loss of rational control, with the guiding hand of the author who signals a complex of social and gender politics that is the cause. Peter Evans' directorial hand is crucial here, as is the selection of material in this adaptation.

Hegh demonstrates, chillingly and movingly, how tissue-thin is the line dividing us from madness, and how conformity to the ideal feminine makes a victim of her subject.


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