From Neil Cooper’s review of New Works New Worlds Festival at the Arches, published July 6 2009 in The Herald. At the festival Julia Taudevin and I premiered our collaboration “The YelloWing.” We’ll move into further development in the fall before a tour around Scotland with the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival:

October 3, 2009 at The Netherbrow, Edinburgh

October 4, 2009  at  Eden Court, Inverness

October 13, 14, 15 & 16th CCA, Glasgow

“There have been many stage versions, for instance, of Charlott e Perkins Gilman’s pioneeri ng novel, The Yellow Wallpaper, which so deftly captured the 19th-century experience of a woman incarcerated after being declared mentally ill. Julia Taudevin and Amanda Monfrooe’s one-woman play, The YelloWing, is a 21st-century response to its source material that suggest things haven’t changed much over the last century or so. Taudevin plays a woman who at first glance has it all; a high-powered career and an ice-cool demeanour, all wrapped up in a little black dress to die for. Once back in what turns out to be some kind of institution, however, the brittle façade crumbles in a torrent of histrionics as she attempts to tear down the walls that confine her. As silhouettes of caged birds conjured from the woman’s imagination flicker on the wall, the voice of her husband at the other end of the telephone backs her further into a corner.

As Taudevin’s character lets rip physically, mentally and every which way, it’s impossible to recognise the “little goose” at the start of the play, such is her increasingly extreme unleashing of what may be a misunderstood form of post-natal depression. While still a work in progress, there’s plenty of dramatic meat to grab hold of in a piece set to be developed further for an autumn tour supported by the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival.”

*Photo by Sha Nazir.