Every now and then you catch glimpses of fellow audience members. Masked and earphoned, metres away from each other in the Donmar – redesigned by Lizzie Clachan so that stage and auditorium are all of a piece – they look like creatures frozen by enchantment or plague. Jessica Hung Han Yun’s lighting – long vertical tubes, first coloured then white – is intermittent: for much of Blindness we are in shared darkness, listening to the tale of an epidemic that wipes out people’s sight.
Director Walter Meierjohann has long wanted to stage José Saramago’s 1995 novel, thinking of it as a metaphor: a response to postwar German politics, or a reaction to the 2008 financial crisis. In this “socially distanced sound installation” (live theatre inside not being permitted) it appears as a pared-down version of the pandemic.
Simon Stephens’s adaptation distils 400 pages into 70 minutes, and reduces a cast of a hundred to one recorded voice. Juliet Stevenson purrs and seethes in our headphones: as the only sighted survivor, she records turmoil and violence when the afflicted turn against each other. Ben and Max Ringham’s soundscape brilliantly conjures up spaciousness, movement and intimacy. Stevenson seems to prowl around the spectators; a lighter snaps on as if inside our heads.
Covid and lockdown have changed our senses as well as our health. Here is a lesson in how, doing without some faculties, we can draw on different resources to make sense of things. It also carries an instruction about wilful blindness: “If you can see, look.”
Witnessing is the lifeblood of Belarus Free Theatre, which last week reported that three of its members had been arrested during the Minsk protests. Since 2005 the company has been performing, without charge, in private apartments, woods and cafes. In 2015 it staged Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis – suicide and depression being taboo in Belarusian art. The threat to dictatorship is salutary: not conventionally political plays but “open conversation”.
• Blindness is at the Donmar Warehouse, London, until 22 August
