Blindness | Adelaide Festival 2022 review
A pandemic of blindness has wide ramifications but the it’s the unusual intensity of this work’s personal experience that matters.
Adelaide Festival
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Blindness
Theatre / UK
ADELAIDE FESTIVAL
Queen’s Theatre
Until March 20
A driver stopped at a traffic light suddenly goes blind, the start of a pandemic of blindness. Like Covid it has wide ramifications.
The socially distanced, experiential theatre adapted from the apocalyptic novel of 1995 by Portuguese writer Jose Saramago has the audience seated, wearing headsets and surrounded by an array of coloured lighting and loudspeakers.
In a blackout we hear the voice of an eye doctor’s wife (recorded by UK actor Juliet Stevenson) who secretly can see while all around her are blind.
She tries to protect her husband and then a small band of his patients as first they are quarantined and then must survive as the world of the seeing disintegrates.
Each member of the audience perceives events as the helpless, blind, eye doctor. Our mind’s eye becomes caught up in the drama to the point of belief in a three-dimensional world around us.
There are calamitous riots, rapes and killings. The wife might whisper urgently into her husband’s left ear. Later, far off to the right and rear, she is involved in a screaming match with guards for food and medicine.
The fitful array of lights hanging overhead that move menacingly down upon us is just one of the occasional lighting effects that adds to the tension.
The tale follows a predictable course but the unusual intensity of the personal experience matters.
On a crude brick wall is the message: “If you can see, look. If you can look, observe”.
Pandemics, for example, are studied with precision, but as we have discovered, treated with disdain.