Books by and for independent women

The Yellow Wallpaper at the London Literature Festival

Yesterday evening, I traipsed through the sunshine to the Southbank Centre for one of the last instalments of the London Literature Festival, which has been taking place in and around the Royal Festival Hall for the last two weeks. Last night, I was there for a sell-out adaptation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman‘s classic feminist short story The Yellow Wallpaper, by theatre company Donkey Work. First published in 1892, it is a semi-autobiographical account of a woman prescribed bed rest by her physician husband as a cure for her nervous depression and “hysteria”. Physically confined to a bedroom and deprived of all sources of “stimulation”, especially reading and writing, her mental health deteriorates as she becomes obsessed with the colour and pattern of the wallpaper in her one-room prison.

But before I could even get in, there was the twenty-minute queue to collect my ticket. As the clock crept ever-closer to the show’s start time, the queuers got more and more grumpy, and the one lone member of staff at the box office became more and more distressed. The other events I’d been to, including talks by Jeanette Winterson and Jackie Kay, had been so smoothly-organised that this seemed a sad and shabby end to the literary festivities.

Sadly, once I’d finally snatched my ticket and raced downstairs with less than a minute to spare, the problems didn’t end there. The Spirit Level, where the performance took place, is the worst space I’ve ever been in for this type of event. The acoustics of the room meant that the dialogue was often drowned out by the shrieks of brats either misbehaving or being murdered on the level above, and the space was closed only by a curtain, so the conversations of anyone entering or exiting the centre through the nearby doors were audible to everyone inside.

Similarly, the format of the performance meant that the audience had to either stand or sit on the floor, following the actors around the room whilst scenes were performed in different sections of the space. Although well-intentioned, this device meant that the shuffling of bottoms and ensuing kerfuffle as everyone assembled their possessions, found a place to sit and then got settled again ended up drowning out some of the dialogue, impacting on the pace, flow and atmosphere of the performance.

That said, the actors themselves were word and pitch-perfect, combining Victorian formality with familial tensions and affections, and effectively conveying the stigma associated with madness and psychosis. The simple sets and lighting were far more evocative than the fussy set-ups favoured by some theatre companies, and the ending was especially powerful, if not strictly faithful to the text. In the story, the heroine’s descent into insanity climaxes when husband enters the room to find her creeping around the walls. In Donkey Work’s adaptation, they seemed to suggest that the heroine had committed suicide, whilst in the text the husband faints and the woman continues to circle the room, stepping over his unconscious body with each lap. In several feminist readings, this detail is crucial, because it is seen as symbolic of her triumph over him. So I’m curious whether Donkey Work’s ending was motivated by the need for a dramatic climax to the performance, or whether it’s a conscious alternative interpretation of the original text.

A classic text such as The Yellow Wallpaper will always be tricky to do justice to, but Donkey Work’s version was brave and original. I’ll be watching what they do in future, but not if it’s on the Southbank Centre’s Spirit Level.

You can read The Yellow Wallpaper online here, or buy it in a collection of other stories from Amazon for only £2.00.

Post by Jane Bradley