The Yellow Wallpaper

Smock Alley Theatre

EITHER THAT wallpaper goes, or she does. So begins the narrator’s dilemma in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s gothic short story, here scrupulously transposed to the stage by Then This theatre. Confined to bed rest for “a slight hysterical tendency” by her Victorian physician husband, the diarist is played by Maeve Fitzgerald, a stately beauty who assumes the hollow ravages of tragedy with merest adjustment. More problematically, the wallpaper is played by us, surrounding her on platforms, looming down from above.

Director Aoife Spillane-Hinks nails the stifling psychology of patrician America – where a woman cannot be herself – but less so the psychology of the reader-turned-spectator: once confidant, now tormentor. It would make sense if we felt implicated in her disintegration, but for all the stark beauty of Alyson Cummins’s set and Sarah Jane Shiels’s lights, the production seems so busy shaking its head at the unambiguous gender politics of “hysteria”, that neither we, nor Fitzgerald’s commanding performance, will fully inhabit its injustice. Her character’s mind is tragically, cruelly divided, but without bridging the distance of history or physical proximity it is held in an equally divided production.

Runs until Saturday