The Opera Story The Yellow Wallpaper
Guest event
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.
Composer: Dani Howard
Librettist: Joseph Spence
Singer: Clare Presland
Cellist: Midori Jaeger
Pianist: Berrak Dyer
Dancer: Valerie Ebuwa
Director: Amy Lane
Lighting designer: Charlie Morgan Jones
Stage designer: Emma Ryott
Design Associate: Damien Stanton
This production is genereously supported by Cokayne / London Community Foundation, the John S. Cohen Foundation, and the Golsoncott Foundation.
Header image: Andrea Piludu
Play trailer
A little bright yellow pearl finishes off Copenhagen Opera Festival array of newly written works, when the young composer Dani Howard captivates her audience with The Yellow Wallpaper★★★★★ SCENEBLOG.DK
Dani Howard’s adaptation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novella is sparse but powerful★★★★ FINANCIAL TIMES
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.REACTION
Performances
Age 16 - 30?
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