LONDON CITY NIGHTS

Wednesday, June 13, 2018

Review: 'The Yellow Wallpaper' at the Omnibus Theatre, 12th June 2018

Wednesday, June 13, 2018 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Reviewed by David James
Rating: 

Adapted by Ruby Lawrence from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 short story of the same name, The Yellow Wallpaper is an ominous tale of psychological horror set within the walls of a single sunny room. Mayou Trikerioti's set catches the eye when you enter the theatre: a clean, minimalist, almost lemony-scented apparition - punctuated only by a cream chaise longue. It looks very Ideal Home - and very far from a nightmare.

And yet this is precisely what it becomes for writer, wife and new mother Alice (Gemma Yates-Round). We meet her in a doctor's office being poked and prodded through medical exams, full of optimism for her new role as a nurturing, caring mother. Yet, after the birth, where we're told that Alice has succumbed to a condition 'that is known to affect a percentage of women', that we recognise as post-partum depression.

Her husband and the doctor prescribe a cure that involves physical and mental rest until she's back to her old self. This involves being separated from her new baby, sequestered away into a country house, instructed to take regular naps, to eat hearty meals, to stop writing and generally to be observed like a lab rat until the men in her life judge her to be 'cured'. 

At the beginning of this process, she discovers the yellow wallpapered room in the house, which may once have been a nursery. Now she spends the long dull days staring at the way the sun and moon play against the wallpaper, occasionally catching a glimpse of some... thing existing within the pattern.

Both Lawrence's adaptation and Gilman's original short story are fuelled by patriarchal dominance. Alice spends the play being stripped of her autonomy and ordered about 'for her own good'. She's deprived of every glimmer of creativity and morsel of intellectual stimulus, and delusions and hallucinations rush to fill the mental void she's forced to occupy. 

This omnipresent sense of masculine control stretches throughout the play, with Charles Warner's 'Not-Alice' (i.e. every other character) Mr Fantastic-ally of manspreading across every single surface. He's constantly enveloping Alice in his arms, his height and reach (and constantly demeaning nicknames like "silly goose") having the effect infantilising her. 

Bolted on top of the original story is a fairytale being written by Alice for her child This story, about a Prince and Princess who go to great lengths to save the life of a frozen giant, at first felt like a distraction. However, I eventually understood it as providing a contrast in healing methods between the top-down authoritarianism of the men imposing a course of therapy upon Alice and the way the characters of the fairytale listen to and understand the plight of the giant. The key difference is that the Prince and Princess suffer greatly in enacting their successful cure, fully committing themselves to a course of action, while the men treating Alice are emotionally and physically unaffected by her condition, seeing her more as a problem to be fixed.

That said, it is perhaps a tonal shift e too far to spend so much of the play telling this fairytale rather than grappling with the psychological reality of what Alice is going through. Though I haven't read the original short story, I found myself comparing this to classics of psychological cinema; namely Roman Polanski's Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby, and Darren Aronofsky's more recent Mother!. All of these films deal with confined women under a masculine thumb whose domestic lives become hell. Thinking of these left me hungry to see a more dramatic transformation in Alice - the arrival of her mania feels like it should be the start of the third act rather than the climax.

Performatively both Yates-Round and Warner deliver the goods, though I'm on the fence about whether Alice's fourth-wall bustin' asides to the audience help or hinder. On one hand, we feel a quick connection and empathy with her, on the other breaking the artifice of the yellow room so early on feels like a waste of atmosphere. Either way, she's a believably tragic figure, playing Alice's condition without sensationalism.

By the time the curtain falls, The Yellow Wallpaper has defined itself as stylish and smart, - a play that asks a whole bunch of pertinent questions yet fails to deliver many answers. I could have done with the various fantastical and domestic elements of the narrative dovetailing a bit more neatly, with perhaps a little more time devoted to the consequences of the final scenes. It leaves a play that's entertaining and sometimes brilliantly atmospheric, but one that lands a little short of unreserved success.

The Yellow Wallpaper is at the Omnibus Theatre until 24 June. Tickets here.

Photos by Lidia Crisafulli

Friday, November 29, 2013

'Woyzeck' at the Omnibus Clapham, 28th November 2013

Friday, November 29, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

When you step through the doors of the Omnibus Clapham you walk into the world of Woyzeck.  The floor is covered in peaty wood chips, the air misty with smoke and the walls covered in ancient looking knick-knacks and gnarled wooden furniture. Bisecting the space is a row of carved stone support columns, giving the room a subterranean, exploratory tinge.  As you pick your way gently to your seats you pass two men; one furiously whittling a stake and the other collapsed against a pillar.  Against this the neat blue fabric of the theatre seats are utterly incongruous and so the audience becomes an interloper in this mad world.

Woyzeck is a play by Georg Büchner, written in 1836 and left tantalisingly incomplete at his premature death at age 23 of typhus.  Büchner's early death was unfortunate for him but fortunate for Woyzeck: the play gains from its imposed abrupt ending, allowing generations of dramatists to apply their own interpretations to the material  Though it's held in high regard now, the play wasn't performed for 66 years after the death of the playwright, but over the 20th century became one of the most influential plays in German theatre.  Prior to this, my only proper exposure to Woyzeck was the excellent 1979 film adaptation by Werner Herzog starring Klaus Kinski, so I was interested in seeing how the play worked as traditional theatre.

Woyzeck (Liam Smith)

Plotwise things are blessedly uncomplicated; we see the story of Johann Christian Woyzeck, a 40 year old soldier living in Leipzig.  He lives with his unwed partner Marie, with whom he has a young child  considered a bastard and not blessed by the church. To earn a few extra crumbs, Woyzeck does odd jobs for a military captain and is used as a test subject by a doctor, who forces Woyzeck to subsist entirely on a diet of peas. This situation, coupled with Woyzeck's latent mental problems, causes him to begin to have a hallucinatory breakdown, experiencing terrifying apocalyptic visions.  Freaked out by her partner's odd behaviour, Marie begins an affair with a studly and buff drum major.  Driven mad with jealousy Woyzeck spirals further into madness, culminating in his stabbing Marie to death.  The play ends on an ambiguous note, with Woyzeck possibly committing suicide by drowning himself.

The Omnibus Clapham's production runs at a lean 75 minutes without an interval, and given the straightforward nature of the plot you might wonder just how complex Woyzeck can really be.  But almost every minute of Büchner's play is stuffed full of philosophical pondering about combative relationships: man v God, man v animal, class v class, man v woman, intelligence v stupidity and many more.  Woyzeck, put-upon and mistreated by all, becomes the ground on which these battles are fought, a man tugged and yanked this way and that by society until he can take no more.

Ruth Roger's puppet is hells freaky.

This production has a pleasingly comedic, warped pantomime sensibility running right through it.  Woyzeck's disturbing, violent delusions of a world scorched clean by fire  feel understandable when confronted with the hellish reality of his everyday existence.  His world is populated by demonic caricatures; the doctor experimenting on him might have stepped out of A Clockwork Orange, a fairground barker is nightmarishly intense and there are striking scenes involving creepily realistic puppet animals that look inspired by the living-dead motion of creatures in a Jan Švankmajer film.

This division between man and animal is frequently highlighted by director Robyn Winfield-Smith.  As the barker yells orders, the three puppeteers bring the beast to creepily realistic life, force him to stand to attention like a soldier and beg for money. This beast of burden is Woyzeck, the picture of a man debased and shat on by all sides. Liam Smith as Woyzeck does an outstanding job of creating a man that we never quite sympathise with, but even in the depths of his madness we still pity him and wish his life was better.  The performance is shot through with nervy tension - as he crawls on all fours you can't help but notice the way the tendons in his neck strain to breaking point; the eyes goggling out of his head combining anger, betrayal and the kind of scared confusion you'd see in the eyes of a punished dog that can't work out what it's done wrong.

David Rubin

The rest of the (surprisingly large) cast acquit themselves similarly well, though a highlight is David Rubin's appearance as a creepy merchant selling Woyzeck the knife to murder his wife.  The lighting perfectly picks out the flashes in his eyes as he takes a sick pleasure in providing a murder weapon.  This one scene struck me as particularly well conceived, the action blocked so that the characters never quite meet each other, the knife appearing in Woyzeck's hand as if was there all along - which in a way it was.

The theatrical space within the Omnibus Clapham works wonders in immersing you in this world, the smells, sensations and spooky ambient soundtrack bringing to mind Punchdrunk Theatre's current production of The Drowned Man.  It's only now that I realise that The Drowned Man is also a adaptation of Woyzeck - perhaps there's some psychic atmosphere that comes packaged the play: Büchner's premature death supernaturally leaching through the centuries, tinging the action with intangible sensations of oncoming apocalypse.

Or maybe it's just a sign of two concurrent productions that excel in their own ways.   Who can say? This production succeeds as intellectual meat, as technically excellent theatre and, perhaps most importantly, as entertainment.  The mordant humour suffusing the performances giving rise to some very twisted giggles in the audience and the exaggerated physicality of the performances keeping everything tight and fast-paced.  A great example of what you can do with 75 minutes and a talented, imaginative company.

★★★★

Woyzeck is at the Omnibus Clapham until 7 December.  Tickets available here.