The putrid wallpaper in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story evokes pus and piss but this adaptation uses barely a shade of yellow. On a stage dominated by a huge screen and cluttered with ropes and a dirty mattress, Stephanie Mohr’s production draws an immediate parallel between the confined woman with “a slight hysterical tendency” and the mysterious female figure she discerns in the pattern on the walls of her room. Aurélia Thierrée narrates while dancer Fukiko Takase, performing in this theatre’s studio, appears via video feed on the screen.
It is a clever concept, with Thierrée and Takase almost alternating the two roles. Takase’s choreography suggests the room’s past as a nursery and gymnasium (at one point she bounces playfully on the bed), as well as the woman’s notion that she is living in a haunted house. In one scene she eerily steps behind Thierrée; in another they almost clutch each other.
As she has proved in her own shows about talking walls and very animate objects, Thierrée is an exquisite physical performer too. Here, she scrawls on the walls in despair (like the teenager in Florian Zeller’s The Son), waveringly stands on one foot and then, portraying her coercive husband, strikes her palm on the ground.
Not all the lines in the story detonate as they do on the page, partly because this hi-tech production often bombards the senses (perhaps emulating the narrator’s restlessness) and over-stresses its points. The notion that the woman is far from alone in her scenario is made not just by doubling the roles but through shadows and hanging smocks that, like the performers’ outfits, suggest medical gowns.
While the footage of Takase is striking, especially the overlapping images of her contorted body, other video of nature and birds becomes a distraction. A baby’s cry is heard from the start, rather than delaying the revelation of the woman’s child as the story does so powerfully. A pram, bound in cloth centre-stage, leaves a more chilling impression.
Thierrée mixes a compelling tone of lilting curiosity and confiding intimacy but the overall intensity could be dialled up, along with the sense that the woman’s creativity is under threat from patriarchal forces. Amid all its busy audio and video effects, this hour is at its most haunting when Thierrée – kept upstage for too long – simply walks up to us with watery eyes, as if searching for meaning in the pattern of the audience.
• At the Coronet theatre, London, until 7 October
