TV REVIEWS : Chilling Descent Into Madness in ‘Wallpaper’

In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a stifling turn-of-the-century marriage and the wife’s descent into madness unfolds with a languid chill. The program airs under the “Masterpiece Theatre” banner Sunday--at 9 p.m. on Channels 28 and 15, at 8 p.m. on Channels 50 and 24.

The story is adapted from an obscure but classic autobiographical novella by long-forgotten, turn-of-the century American writer, reformer and crusader Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Her tale, ahead of its time in its exploration of sexual politics, mirrors the torpor of an imaginative young wife whose husband treats her like a Dresden doll.

In fact, this story (from 1892, when most publishers wouldn’t touch it) unfolds like the worst-case scenario of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House”--or what might have happened to Nora if she hadn’t managed to flee her obtuse husband and similar toy-like marriage.

The wife in the psychological horror story (a heightened version of Gilman’s own marriage at the time) is suffering oppressive fears induced by her hyperactive imagination, boredom and virtual domestic incarceration.

The lazy mood of the production’s painterly compositions and writer Maggie Wadey’s faithful adaptation hints without histrionics at the enveloping madness.

Indeed, the wife’s musings and her silences serve to better highlight her infrequent outbursts. Beware that the tone is so languorous it may drive some impatient viewers to examine their own wallpaper. But actress Julia Watson in her high-neck gowns nicely suggests the tension adrift in the quiet mansion and especially in her attic bedroom.

What the production succeeds at is visualizing the wife’s fantasies as she lies staring into the intricate patterns of her sickly yellow wallpaper. In a blood-freezing conclusion, with the husband (Stephen Dillon) battering at the door and the wife ripping at the wallpaper, she fades in and out of the wall itself.

The sequence, with the now-crazed woman embracing her own becalmed persona, is eerily and inventively staged by former TV commercial director John Clive, making his TV drama debut.

(Gilman, suffering from cancer and judging herself no longer of any use to society, took chloroform and took her own life at her home in Pasadena in 1935 at the age of 75. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is published by the Feminist Press of the City University of New York.)