The Opera Story presents a new opera by emerging talent and RPS Award winner Dani Howard, based on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s groundbreaking 1892 feminist short novel The Yellow Wallpaper, and directed by Amy Lane.
The yellow wallpaper adorns the walls of the room in which a young woman undergoes an involuntary “rest” cure following a postpartum depression. 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.
Acclaimed mezzo-soprano Clare Presland is an alluring reference point in the role of the woman who secretly tries to write her way out of captivity. Together with a pianist, a cellist and a dancer, she redeems Dani Howard’s melancholic and extremely beautiful composition with libretto written by Joseph Spence.