The Yellow Wallpaper in Copenhagen: a complex but faultless production

I had just experienced a faultless dress rehearsal before the premiere in Copenhagen of British composer, Dani Howard’s opera, The Yellow Wallpaper, based on the increasingly “du jour” 1892 American feminist novella by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The work is produced by The Opera Story, a London based company, in collaboration with Copenhagen Opera Festival.

Backstage at the trendy Aveny-T theatre, in conversation with director Amy Lane, I asked if such a minimalist work – one mezzo-soprano singer, a dancer, a pianist and a cellist, was a challenge to stage. With an expression of benevolent tolerance Lane introduced me to her world, confiding state secrets. She opened her working score. I felt I had become an insider. Sarastro had admitted me to his/her secret order.

All those tiny, coloured post-it notes peppering the staves recorded, in perfectly formed script, every detailed onstage movement, created by Lane in response to the music even before staging began. Sure, nothing was written in stone, but when Lane begins rehearsals, whatever opera she is directing is firmly conceived in her head.

I’ve seen working scores before. Often, they resemble manuscript that has suffered a fatal road traffic accident with an inkpot.

I told her Reaction has had a bit of an Amy Lane summer. Götterdämmerung at Longborough. Romeo et Juliette in Savonlinna. And now Copenhagen, where Lane is also Artistic Director of the opera festival. Does the quietly ambitious director relish fresh challenges?

You bet. Apart from everything else, she’s only directing the whole of Wagner’s Ring Cycle at Longborough in 2024. And all four of the cycle works are her babies. I strongly advise hoarding post-it notes while stocks last. I gained the impression she is relishing the experience of being responsible for complete, albeit smaller, companies rather than working in important, but secondary roles in larger houses. Lane was a highly valued Head Staff Director at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden for five years. Strategically, she has chosen to till more testing ground. For now.

Back to Copenhagen, where the opera festival coincided with Copenhagen Pride Week. And, bizarrely, an Ironman competition. No sense of irony there then. The city was in a state of perma-closure. Coloured floats with popping balloons clashed with determined head-down cyclists all over town. A Pride marcher brought Kermit the Frog to the premiere and plonked him down in his own seat. Green Frog, meet Yellow Wallpaper. Only in uber tolerant Copenhagen.

This version of The Yellow Wallpaper was conceived by librettist, Joseph Spence, Master of Dulwich College. Spence, apart from being a prominent teacher, is a playwright on a journey to becoming a librettist. He is fascinated by the scope offered by the operatic medium and the tight libretto he has written for the fifty-minute Wallpaper is proof proper he has hit his stride.

The words are carefully honed, the lines containing only occasional repeats for emphasis. Extraneous elements of the story are discarded. A rope appears in the final pages of the book – is the woman preparing to commit suicide? – but the hint leads to no new storyline. It’s missing from the opera. Spence should have been Gilman’s editor in 1892.

 So, he has delivered a libretto upon which composer Dani Howard has been able to build a beguiling sound world depicting the strains on the increasingly troubled main character, gaining insights into her dilemma as the drama unfolds.

Time to explain what The Yellow Wallpaper is all about. No Osborne and Little here. We are invited to share a traumatic space, brought into a room where a woman has been deprived of her freedom. She is mentally ill, perhaps suffering from post-partem depression. Her husband, John, we are told, is a doctor who insists she be locked up for her own good. But, what are his true motives?

The woman may start out as optimistically deluded about her fate but reveals occasional flashes of insight through sarcasm.

He feeds me full of red wine
And rare red meat.
He loves me dearly, in this marriage, He doesn’t want me sick.

Oh, yeah? Time to get real.

The room is atop a venerable, but deserted mansion, rented for the summer. There is a sense of isolation, with scurrying figures glimpsed in the world below from the windows. The wallpaper is an unattractive yellow with strange markings.

At a post opera talk Lane quoted from the beginning of Gilman’s novella, words from the mouth of the woman, which could have come straight from an Airbnb post, “It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.”

The opera tells a horrifying story of transition from that misconception in a more condensed form than the novella. As well as the rope other details are omitted. For example, in the book reference is made to the bed being nailed to the floor, surely a sinister hint at the room’s previous use as a place of captivity. I would have liked the nailed-down bed to be at least alluded to in the libretto.

Time passes and a slowly dawning realisation that her incarceration is not in the woman’s best interest takes hold. This house is not benevolent. She begins to see an emerging “other” entrapped by the yellow wallpaper, attempting to break free.

There are things in the paper
That nobody knows but me.
Let me whisper what I must not speak, or write:
There is a woman creeping behind the pattern.

In this production, the character struggling behind the wallpaper is represented, not by another voice, but by a dancer, who maintains a presence throughout. The choreographer and dancer, Valerie Ebuwa, was nothing short of sensational, from the moment she appeared, mistily, behind the wallpaper, passing across the stage while drawing her hand lightly over the cellist and pianist, creating a sense of unity, to the last seconds when she seemed to merge seamlessly with the woman.

Clare Presland, mezzo-soprano, sang the intensely difficult role of the woman. She had good prep, coming fresh from the BBC Proms where she took part in György Ligerti’s Requiem. Roles come no tougher than this. Ligerti is visceral. Post Ligerti, Wallpaper probably seemed something of a romp.

Presland truly inhabited the role and gave total commitment. It was almost a surprise at a later alfresco supper to discover that she was capable of descending from that wretched room to a pizza parlour with no visible ill effects whatsoever.

Howard’s music ratcheted up the tension. The cello, surprisingly, survived doubling as a percussion instrument – it had the hell beaten out of it – and in the hands of Midori Jaeger, a London singer, cellist and songwriter, seemed sometimes in dialogue with the woman, at other times the voice of the dancing figure behind the wallpaper. 

The pianist was Berrak Dyer, who drove Howard’s intensely rhythmical music forward with understanding and determination. At times I thought the piano overreached, quashing the cello’s narrative, but I am at risk of descending into the pointless land of quibble-babble. Dyer’s was a highly sensitive performance.

Spoiler alert for those attending the upcoming Sadler’s Wells performances at the Lily Bayliss Studios on 14 and 15 September. (You must go. This is an unmissable experience.) There is no yellow wallpaper. Stage designer Emma Ryott and light designer Charlie Morgan Jones delivered a triumph in yellow illusion that appeared simple but must have had the performers’, and the director’s, nerves jangling.

The performing space was bounded by rows of tiny yellow lights projecting upwards from the floor.  Special effect haze turned the lights into an opaque vertical curtain – yellow wallpaper – which could be manipulated at will.  From time to time the dancer, attempting to break through the wallpaper, would stretch a hand forward or bow her head into the light, creating an amazing visual effect.

The action crescendoed to a point where, trying to break through by stripping the wallpaper away, the dancer’s straining and grunting took over as the music died. This was a moment of total commitment and the profound silence from the enthralled audience that followed said it all. Job done.

I’ve got out,
In spite of you.
And I’ve pulled off the paper, So, you can’t send me back!

These concluding lines from the woman tell of a triumph of a kind. But no easy closure is offered. The experience challenges the audience and seeing it, as I did, on the very day it was revealed our NHS had harboured in its midst someone determined to harm innocent babies – just as Dr John had plotted to make his wife succumb to his perverted will – was sobering.

This is a complex opera that does justice to Gilman’s work, portrayed too often these days as a simple, feministy horror flick. In the words of the accompanying blurb, “The story of the obsession of this woman forced into isolation with the wallpaper’s unattractive colour and patterns carries an urgent message about social structures discriminatory to women that is still highly relevant today.”

It is not a work for the casual observer bent on an evening of entertainment. I found it intensely unsettling, raising questions about relationships and accepted norms that require personal resolution. As an artwork it is profound. In execution it was compelling. Delivered by a team of top quality artists in harmony, with a common cause. The Yellow Wallpaper is opera with true purpose.

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