Blindness - both as reality and metaphor - has already been explored on stage this year in the Frantic Assembly, Graeae and Paines Plough collaboration, On Blindness. Now Canadian writer Alex Bulmer offers her experience of going blind in adulthood as a result of a hereditary genetic disease. The curious thing about both these productions is how strongly visual and physical they are, as if - like Freddie in Smudge, who must find new ways to cope with her darkening world - the audience is being forced to "see" or experience the play in many different ways, not just through the text.
Jessica Higgs's free-flying, exquisitely designed production ensures that you do just that, incorporating circus skills, movement and an almost doppelganger effect, a human version of the kind of intimate relationship that you sometimes get between puppeteer and puppet.
Bulmer charts her progression from diagnosis (the inevitable insensitive doctor who imparts the catastrophic news with blithe indifference) through rage and grief at her loss to a kind of reluctant acceptance. In a final scene of tentative optimism, she realises it may be possible for her to see a way forward in a sighted world as others have done before her.
It is this internal journey that is quite the most interesting part of the evening, and which brings out the best - and most poetic - in the writing. This is clearly an immensely personal play, but I could have done with considerably fewer of the scenes between Freddie and her girlfriend.
This is a very small evening, but it is wrapped up in such a clever way that the audience has to find a way to make sense of it just as Freddie is having to make sense of her changing sensory world. The partially sighted actress Karina Jones turns in another superb performance, and there is great support from Kathryn Akin and Heather Richards.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 020-7582 7680.
