StemCell Therapy

While other theatres remain closed, the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden welcomes audiences four times a day to experience a socially distanced sound installation. After following a strict anti-Covid drill (distanced queuing and seating, sanitiser, face masks), people hear a recording over headphones of Juliet Stevenson narrating an adaptation of the Portuguese Nobel laureate Jos Saramagos 1995 novel Blindness.

Saramagos story is simple but, like Albert Camuss The Plague, even more resonant in the current climate. One day, a driver stops his car at some traffic lights because he cant see any more. It is soon apparent that this form of blindness is contagious and, within days, the whole city, then the country, is infected.

Caught up in the chaos of the inexplicable epidemic is an unnamed eye doctor, his strong-willed wife and some of their patients. As the Government uses the army to herd the sightless victims into a disused asylum for quarantine, it becomes clear the doctors wife is the only person who retains her sight.

Adapted by playwright Simon Stephens into a 70-minute narrative monologue, in which Stevenson also plays the doctors wife, Blindness shows how quickly society can disintegrate when an epidemic renders citizens vulnerable. The strong terrorise the weak; the government fails to control the sickness; but there is hope in collective solidarity despite acute adversity.

Loss of sight can mean a better perception rather than a disability, and this version of the novel is alive to current resonances. The announcements of the Government recall not only the injunctions of various military juntas, but also strike closer to home, talking glibly of a curve of resolution.

At other moments, the horror of a minister losing their sight during a press conference goes hand in hand with the feeling that often these events are designed to blind you with untruths. Likewise, the repeated notion of individual responsibility roots this universal fable in an Anglo-Saxon context.

A great part of the show is experienced in darkness, and Ben and Max Ringhams immersive binaural sound design allows Stevenson to whisper in your ear or rush across a room, shouting in the distance. She begins coolly and becomes increasingly desperate. The feeling of intimacy and reality iscompelling.

Walter Meierjohanns production also uses Lizzie Clachans design and Jessica Hung Han Yuns multi-coloured strip lighting to brilliant effect, all of which remind us of the importance of sight.

Blindness is inventive and thoroughly engrossing a real light in our current darkness.

To 22 August (020 3282 3808)

THEARTSDESK.COM

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Blindness is inventive and thoroughly engrossing a real light in our current darkness - iNews

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