Reviewed by Eddy Knight, Thursday 24th February 2022.
To state that Jose Saramagos's 1995 novel,
Blindness, is one of my 'favourite' novels would be a misnomer. What I would say is that it is probably the most powerful novel I have read this century, and the one which affected me most deeply. It was cited as one of the reasons this Portuguese writer was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize for literature, an award richly deserved.
For fans of dystopian fiction (and there seem to be a lot about these days), Blindness is the mother lode, reading something like a melange of William Golding's Lord of the Flies, John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids, and Cormac McCarthy's The Road, with a soupçon of
George Orwell thrown in for good measure.
What makes the novel, and thus, this adaptation, particularly relevant, is that it concerns a pandemic. It questions what would happen if suddenly people started going blind? Well, of course, the government would begin by denying it was happening, next, insisting that it was just a few isolated cases. Then they would round these cases up and force them into lockdown, in this case in a disused mental asylum, with armed guards at the gate to prevent the spread of the infection. Sound familiar?
We are then given a vision of what life would be like in this asylum as more and more internees arrive and the government basically gives up in the face of the insurmountable problem. We are painted this picture by the all-enveloping voice of
Juliet Stevenson, who is the sole person unaffected by the disease. Despite this, she lies to the ambulance officers collecting her eye doctor husband, and accompanies him into internment. She has to pretend to be blind, at first, and we hear her trying to suppress her outrage at the mounting conditions of filth, squalor, and inhumanity that she sees all about her.
Don't be misled, though, this is not an audiobook that she is reading for us. She is a consummate actor, completely immersed in the character and, by the magic of the binaural sound channelled through our headphones, she is there in the room with us or, rather, we are there with her, sometimes so close that, as we supposedly lay together in our hospital bed and she whispered in my ear, I actually turned to look at her. At other times, she strides about, railing at the situation, "This is against all the rules of humanity!" being one noticeable line.
The sound design, by Ben and
Max Ringham, is so clear that you can follow her every move, locate her exact position at all times, hear her dragging shovels, tripping over dead bodies, organising an attack on the inmates of another ward who have wrested control of all the food and demand payment for it, firstly in valuables, and then in women. As in Golding's Lord of the Flies, the picture painted of an isolated society imploding upon itself is far from pretty, but these are adults, not children, and the descent is darker.
To compress a three hundred page novel into an hour and ten minutes is no mean feat but playwright,
Simon Stephens, has accomplished the task admirably. A lot, of course, has to be left out, but all the main events are portrayed, and the feeling of the piece is rendered with total accuracy.
The semi-decrepit Queen's Theatre is the perfect venue for such a production, and the semi-darkness in which we sit is not so much to give us an experience of blindness (it is not that dark most of the time) but, rather, to allow our imaginations to roam free. Besides, there is a lighting design, by
Jessica Hung Han Yan, which consists of a collection of brightly coloured light tubes that occasionally flare up, change colours, and punctuate proceedings in, sometimes, disconcerting ways.
The director, Walter Meierjohann, is to be congratulated, firstly, for having the idea to stage it as a play and, then, being able to pull it all together so successfully for
The Donmar Warehouse theatre company. Despite all of the preceding darkness,
Juliet Stevenson left me with such an uplifting metaphorical image. Three women stand on a high-rise balcony, while a deluge of biblical proportions finally washes them and their city clean, restoring sight to the world.
Photography: Helen Maybanks.
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