The Yellow Wallpaper, Coronet Theatre

The American novelist and early feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) is perhaps best remembered for her semi-autobiographical novella The Yellow Wallpaper. In it she tells the story of a young woman incarcerated in an attic nursery by her husband as a cure for 'a slightly hysterical tendency.' She becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper on the walls, and in her distress imagines a woman trapped in the patterns. She resolves to free the woman.

This story provides fertile ground for a theatrical adaptation, particularly one that brings together the multifarious talents of three very distinct artists: multi-award-winning director Stephanie Mohr, whose previous directing work at the Coronet was in Christopher Hampton's Youth Without God in 2019; the multicultural Japanese dancer Fukiko Takase, whom you may have seen dancing in Akram Khan’s Jungle Book Reimagined; and Aurélia Thierrée, an offspring of the illustrious Chaplin and Thierrée families. Last seen at the Coronet with her piece Bells and Spells in 2019, Thierrée has performed internationally in cabaret and circus, as well as having a career in film.

Together they devised a radical show show that fuses theatre, dance, live video and sound, and uses simultaneous digital links between the studio and the auditorium, to tell an absorbing story and highlight the contemporary relevance of Perkins Gilman's novella.