Edward is an audio-subtitler embarking on a relationship with a beautiful blind woman, Maria. When he arrives at her house, the teenager from next door is wanking off in front of her unseeing eyes. His colleague, Shona, hadn't seen old acquaintance Dan in years, then closed her eyes at a party and there he was. Now they are moving in together. Gaetano has painted Shona and the unveiling of the painting is tonight.
Glyn Cannon's play weaves together the strands of Edward and Shona's relationships in 90 minutes of theatre that goes some way to making you look at the world a little differently.
Cannon's script offers plenty of observations on a theme, as it ponders what we see and what we choose not to see, particularly when we look at the person we love. Uptight Edward is blind to Maria's sexual needs; Dan, who has seen and explored every inch of Shona's body, is scandalised when he sees that body exposed on canvas. If I see the world differently from you, how can we ever be together? Do men and women have incompatible outlooks on life? Is language more about sound or visualisation?
There is nothing startlingly original about these musings and there is something rather schematic about the way they are laid before us, but the piece is given an extra dimension in this co-production between three of contemporary theatre's most exciting companies - Frantic Assembly, Graeae and Paines Plough.
The production expertly mines the text to create a fascinating evening in which the tensions between what we see and what we think are made physically manifest. It is one of those shows that yields just as much when you close out the words and just watch the characters' physical and spatial relationships to each other. It is like watching a complex, beautiful dance and it is made all the more interesting and multi-faceted in the way that it effortlessly and seamlessly throws an extra language into the brew - signing.
