Unique and disturbing: Donmar Warehouse's Blindness reviewed

Okay, I admit it. I have a girl crush on Juliet Stevenson. Ever since I first saw her in the 1990 film Truly, Madly, Deeply with Alan Rickman, I have loved her sexy, round and intelligent tones. Imagine how excited I was to discover, therefore, that you can have Juliet in your ear for a whole hour and 15 minutes while you sit through a so-called ‘sound installation’ — or rather an audio staging — of Blindness, the current offering at the Donmar Warehouse and the first opening since lockdown.

Sitting in a darkened theatre studio, with strobe lighting and headphones, you are seated in your own space, and socially distanced from 40 other people. While this may not sound like everyone’s idea of fun, once you let go of the traditional notion of theatre and where the stage is, it was intriguing. Here was Stevenson narrating the entire script on a pre-recorded soundtrack and leading us through an unknown world that becomes increasingly terrifying.

At moments I felt as if Stevenson were telling this story just to me, which was both intimate and claustrophobic

Based on the novel of the same name by the Nobel prize-winner Jose Saramago, the play follows the impact of a contagious disease in an unnamed city that renders its victims instantly blind. Stevenson, who plays the doctor’s wife (no one is ever named), introduces us to different characters, including a loyal dog, who accompany her through her story. This is a world where blindness seems to cause everyone to lose all notions of social cohesion. Not affected by the disease, our guide fakes blindness so that she can accompany her blind husband, who with other souls is shipped by the government to be housed in an ex-mental asylum. As the world falls apart, so too does life in the ward, and we bear witness to her and others’ travails as they struggle for food and water to survive.