by Simon Stephens from the novel by José Saramago
seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 27 August 2020
The play is based on Saramago's 1995 novel, which describes in harrowing detail the effects of an unexplained epidemic of blindness afflicting an unnamed (presumably Portuguese) city. Juliet Stevenson narrates the description of the onset of the epidemic, and then takes the role of the Doctor's Wife, who, through not contracting the disease, is able to help a small group of people survive the ensuing breakdown of civil society. For much of the time she pretends to be blind herself, until it is no longer useful to do so.
Although Simon Stephens began work on his adaptation some eighteen months ago, and the director Walter Meierjohann had been thinking of staging an adaptation for some twenty years, neither of them could have imagined the wider circumstances in which the production has been launched. The Donmar, like all other theatres in Britain, has been closed since late March, and it is among the first indoor venues to attempt a reopening of sorts; the industry in general cannot see how to stage live performances with massively reduced seating capacity since theatres usually rely on at least 80% capacity to break even.
The solution in this small theatre is to take out all the stalls seats and build up the floor of the acting area to be level with the fourth row (the back row), and then to place pairs of chairs around the space at socially distanced intervals, allowing for an audience of about forty members. Furthermore, each member of the audience has a set of headphones (assiduously cleaned after each performance). Above, there are ranks of tube lighting, some vertical and some horizontal, which change colour before the start. At one dramatic point, the horizontal tubes are lowered to eye level, but for much of the time thereafter, at the height of the epidemic, they are switched off and the audience is n near-total darkness - even the theatre exit signs are not lit.
Everything then depends on the sound. Juliet Stevenson is a gifted actor with a wonderfully expressive voice, and the results are startlingly effective, especially once the soundscape emerges into a full stereophonic effect. The opening narration is dry, but the Doctor's Wife's experience is by turns intimate, practical, worried, enraged, desperate and determined. One feels at times one must be the Doctor, as she whispers confidentially into one's ear; then she is off comforting a young blind boy, or even further away negotiating with soldiers or extortionists in another room. The attention to aural detail by Ben and Max Ringham is astonishingly powerful, and the result is by turns intriguing, frightening, and just occasionally uplifting. There is no point in hoping for a measured response to the crisis by the authorities, since the affliction is all but universal and civic purpose and decency collapses very quickly. Survival can only be ensured by the concentrated effort of small groups of people hoping to find food and water in a now hostile environment.
The outlook in the story is considerably more grim than what we have experienced in the last few months, but that experience itself is bound to affect our reaction to the piece, which brings into sharp focus issues of co-operation and solidarity in a particularly pointed way. It is profoundly eerie to emerge from the experience onto the streets of London at what should be peak early evening travelling time to find them comparatively empty, and to travel home on a train in which there would normally be standing room only for much of the trip in a carriage with barely twenty people in it.
Over years he novel has attracted criticism from blind people for its casual assumption that blindness in itself is a disaster. Although the focus is really on the epidemic, rather than on the blindness, its use as the defining symbol of inadequacy leading to societal collapse can only have been conceived by a sighted person for whom the onset of blindness is a terror. The production team here have not fallen into the error of merely trying to 'teach' the audience what it might be like to be blind: the darkness is in fact richly creative space for imagining the story.
