Blindness – Arts Festival show for times we live in

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

Survival is always uplifting,” says writer Simon Stephens whose adaptation of José Saramago’s 1995 novel, Blindness, opens at the Arts Festival this weekend. The production from London’s Donmar Warehouse premiered in Summer 2020 – the first post-lockdown event in London last year when it was hugely acclaimed. The critical and audience accolades continued as this show about a city afflicted by a plague of blindness, toured to cities including New York and Hong Kong.

“I thought the novel was quite uplifting,” says the playwright, whose previous adaptations include The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time which won the 2015 Tony Award for best play.

“There are some harrowing moments but fundamentally, it’s a novel about someone who survives the entirely unimaginable. Survival is always uplifting.”

The Nobel-winning Portuguese author Saramago wrote the novel as a metaphor for dictatorships – his homeland was under authoritarian rule until 1974. It’s set in an unnamed city which is suddenly hit by a mysterious, infectious blindness. Those affected are consigned to a psychiatric hospital in a failed bid to contain it. Just one woman retains her sight and if she is to help others survive the cruelty and depredation that ensues, she must feign blindness.

While the novel was intended as metaphor for tyranny, the adaptation proved timely when it eventually saw the light of day last year during Covid. The process of getting the book to stage took more than two decades, Simon explains.

It was the realisation of a long-held dream for director Walter Meierjohann, who, after many failed attempts, eventually commissioned Simon to adapt it. Walter also directs.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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