The Donmar Warehouse in London is to reopen this summer for an immersive sound installation exploring the panic caused by an epidemic. Blindness, an hour-long adaptation of Portuguese author José Saramago’s novel, will feature the voice of Juliet Stevenson and will run four times a day, with socially distanced seating for audiences.
Saramago won the Nobel prize for literature in 1998, shortly after the publication of Blindness. The Donmar’s artistic director, Michael Longhurst, said the story – in which a city’s inhabitants suddenly begin to go blind – is an “extraordinary allegory about a government’s and society’s response to a pandemic”.
A maximum of two tickets for Blindness can be purchased per transaction and audiences will be admitted in a pair if they are from the same household or have formed a social bubble, as they will be seated together. Those attending on their own will be given a single seat at a 2m distance from others. Visitors are required to wear a face covering, bar areas will be closed and there will be a one-way system in operation around the theatre.
Like all indoor venues, the Covent Garden theatre is not yet permitted to stage live performance. Longhurst said he was “proud that the Donmar has risen to the challenge of producing work at this time” and that the sound installation would make a virtue of the Covid-19 restrictions. Set designer Lizzie Clachan and lighting designer Jessica Hung Han Yun will transform the venue for the installation, which has been created with binaural technology. Visitors will listen on headphones to a soundscape created by Ben and Max Ringham. The adaptation is by Simon Stephens and Blindness is directed by Walter Meierjohann. It runs from 3–22 August. Audio-described content will be available and there will also be a captioned installation.
A film version of Blindness, directed by Fernando Meirelles, was released in 2008. This summer, the Royal Shakespeare Company was due to stage Tiago Rodrigues’s adaptation of both Blindness and Saramago’s sequel, Seeing, at the Swan theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. That production was cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Blindness runs at the Donmar Warehouse, London, from 3-22 August.
