Stephen Dillane in The Yellow Wallpaper

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Stephen Dillane

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THE YELLOW WALLPAPER by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
1989

Stephen Dillane	John
Julia Watson	Charlotte
Carolyn Pickles	Jennie
James Faulkner	Charles Stark
Dorothy Tutin	Mrs. Stamford
Maggie Wadey	screenplay
John Clive	director

PBS Masterpiece Theatre

Original Airdate December 17, 1989

Charlotte is a young wife suffering from what Victorian doctors termed "nervous fatigue". Her physician-husband, John, takes her to a strange country house he rented to help her recover. A strongly creative woman, Charlotte is desperate to work, primarily to write, but her husband will have none of it. He insists her cure lies in doing nothing. Confined to a top-floor room, Charlotte begins to be obsessed by its wallpaper. It's a stickly yellow color that both fascinates and disgusts her as she lies in bed and tries to trace its intricate patterns. Descending rapidly into insanity, she thinks she sees the figure of a woman behind the paper, trapped behind the bars in the paper's design. Slowly but surely the wallpaper's tortuous pattern finds its way into her mind until she finally comes face-to-face with the woman who has been haunting her.

Stephen is billed as "Stephen Dillon" in this film.

The Star-Ledger

Friday December 15, 1989

Pass The White Knuckle Test With Ease

by Jerry Krupnick

The Yellow Wallpaper is a British adaptation of a famous short story by an early American feminist, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who told in this autobiographical tale about her desperate nervous breakdown.

This harrowing tale is a one-shot 90-minute "Masterpiece Theater" presentation that is extremely well done, that builds to its extraordinary climax with such compelling and ominous force that once you become involved, you must see it through to that end.

We have one major objection to the production, however. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a leading American feminist writer and activist at the turn of this century and wrote this brief novella at the age of 32, as part of her autobiography.

The British have seen fit to remove her story from its Connecticut country setting and place it somewhere outside of London, where the circumstances of what is happening to her are not quite in the same context.

We don't object to the British dramatizing the American story, just to moving it so far away from its original concept and setting.

That complaint out of the way, let us tell you that Julia Watson as Charlotte is superb, so convincing in her portrait of a woman going mad that we want to reach in and shake up all the people responsible for it, to somehow make them stop and leave her be.

In "The Yellow Wallpaper," Charlotte has been taken to a creaky old country house by her concerned husband (Stephen Dillon), a doctor who is trying to cure her of what the medical authorities of the time called "nervous fatigue."

A major part of his cure is to prescribe a regimen of doing nothing at all, of undisturbed rest in a quiet, highly ordered environment.

However, Charlotte always has been a strongly creative woman who thrives on writing and reading and keeping herself vitally active. And this forced "doing nothing" slowly drives her mad.

Watson does a marvelous job delineating the subtle changes that come over her throughout this ordeal. And she receives sterling support from Dillon as her well-meaning husband and from Carolyn Pickles, as his sister, who has been assigned the job of making sure Charlotte follows doctor's orders.

The results are chilling drama, leaving us hypnotized and helpless by its eventual horror.

We just wish the producers had not changed the environment so. That's the trouble with "Masterpiece Theater," of course. Anything American is somehow thought of as second-rate. Too bad.

The Sunday Patriot

Sunday December 17, 1989

Masterpiece' film should convince you of perils of marriage

by Sharon Johnston

If "She Devil" and "The War of the Roses" haven't convinced you that marriage may be hazardous to your mental health, tonight's PBS "Masterpiece Theater" offering on WITF should do the trick.

Horror films don't get much more chilling than this version of radical feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman's autobiographical tale, "The Yellow Wallpaper."

This novella, first published in 1892, is the story of a dutiful wife's descent into madness as she attempts to conform to Victorian ideals of the proper wife and mother.

Charlotte (Julia Watson), a physician's wife, has been banished to a country home for treatment of nervous exhaustion. Her husband John (Stephen Dillon), his devoted sister, her young son and the baby's nurse are her only companions. For an occasional treat, her disapproving mother-in-law comes to visit.

The cure prescribed by John and a consulting specialist is simple: all rest and no work. Particularly, no intellectual work.

For Charlotte, for whom writing is as natural as breathing and reading a constant source of delight, being cut off from her work and from any intellectual stimulation is torture.

She feels like a foreigner surrounded by people to whom writing is "an unhealthy addiction" and who believe that "a woman who speaks her mind speaks out of turn."

Trapped in marriage to a man who "does not understand that I must have something to occupy my imagination," Charlotte's imagination becomes fixed on the fading wallpaper in her attic bedroom.

She becomes convinced that a woman is trapped behind that wall, waiting to be set free.

This real-life horror story is considerably more unnerving than the average slasher film, thanks to the astute casting and atmospheric staging of this fine British production.

Watson is enthralling as the Victorian woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Dillon is horrifying in his selfless and thoughtless but determined care of his wife. (Think what Kathleen Turner's Barbara Rose would have done if this man had been the spouse she longed to shed!)

Dorothy Tutin has a brief but telling cameo as Watson's disdainful mother-in-law.

Maddie Waddey's screenplay is a faithful feminist adaptation of Gilman's novella. Director John Clive's direction of this claustrophobic tale successfully conveys the sense of impending doom.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" would be the week's most depressing film - it's the rare one-episode, 90-minute "Masterpiece Theatre" offering - if it weren't so well done. Don't expect to find it uplifting. But if you'll settle for unsettling and consistently fascinating, "The Yellow Wallpaper" should fill the bill.

TV Review "The Yellow Wallpaper" segment of "Masterpiece Theatre," WITF-TV, 10 p.m.

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