TREE Shadow Theatre Company’s two feminist classics, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and ‘Overtones,’ by Alice Gettysburg made imaginative use of the Creative Innovation Centre’s space in its energetic double bill.

Actors admirably tackled Perkins Gilman’s harrowing short story of Hannah, a young Victorian wife’s descent into madness when her physician husband prescribes isolation in a country house and bed rest for three months.

Scratching the floor of the nursery in which she is incarcerated, Hannah believes she can see a woman creeping behind the yellow wallpaper, trying to get out, as her ‘shadow’ creatively adopts the persona of the woman trying to escape.

The second play by Gettysburg explored the fascinating contrast between the surface politeness people adopt in society, and the dual conversation people hold with themselves as they say one thing, and think another, in front of their friends.

Watching the players adopt their social face and the changes in its dynamics as the girls faultlessly alternated between text and subtext, the conscious and the unconscious, while standing behind each other’s chairs to convey the hypocrisy underlying this meeting, was a fascinating examination of the tension between appearance and reality.

JUDY NORRISH