Yellow at Riverside Studios is a great example of the future of the horror genre says Naima Khan.
When I first read The Yellow Wallpaper at school, the Gothic nature of the story was obvious. Now, thanks to Daniel Saleeb's Yellow, I can see loud and clear the 'horror' tag that comes with it. Saleeb takes the most disturbing aspects of this story and heightens them visually and aurally, successfully placing his audience in his protagonist's nightmare. Conceptually, it's brilliant but in practice, the soundscape fails to take us on any kind of journey and instead lets us dwell in an oppressive, discordant world where the imagery overrides the music.
Saleeb experiments bravely with live surround sound, inviting the audience to sit in a circle in the middle of the room, with the performance unfolding from the outside and the centre. Dirty limericks are read out from opposite sides of the space to squeaks and sounds you'd hear in The Magic Roundabout and the show presents itself like a crude radio play before it launches us into the mind of the central character.
Delicate and innocent looking, she is folded over in the centre while TV screens impose their harsh glare and eerie images of vacant woods at night. Here, Georgia Lowe's design outshines the sound and provides a clever balance. The woman scratches her journal entries onto cream paper under a warm light. Even her pencil is a sunshine yellow with a rosy pink rubber on the end. Contrasted with the cold images on the TVs, it works well in highlighting her fear, her solitary confinement and how safe she comes to feel there. But at this stage in the show's development, it's not practically effective. The screens, for example, aren't big enough, the sound is too loud for the space and the singing is often drowned out by the instruments.
Technical issues aside, the core of this operatic piece is a brilliantly innovative way of looking at sexual callousness associated with the male psyche. The persistent sound of "John says" conveys the creepy possessiveness and the cruel limericks about selfish conquests result in a different kind of triumph as we hear about a mean sex game going hilariously wrong for the guy.
While the tech could use some work, Yellow does what Tete a Tete Festival sets out to do: push the boundaries of opera. It also proves that as a theatre maker, Daniel Saleeb is well worth keeping an eye on for the simple reason that he's created something simultaneously gripping and repulsive – which is exactly what horror theatre should be.
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