Blindness

As the lights change at a major crossroads in a city in the heart of Europe a car grinds to a halt. Its driver can drive no more. Suddenly, without warning or cause, he has gone blind. Within hours it is clear that this is a blindness like no other. This blindness is infectious. Within days an epidemic of blindness has spread through the city. The government tries to quarantine the contagion by herding the newly blind people into an empty asylum. But their attempts are futile. The city is in panic.

Award-winning playwright Simon Stephens (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, for which he won both the the Tony© and Olivier Awards for Best Play) has adapted Nobel Prize-winner José Saramago’s dystopian novel Blindness as a sound installation directed by Walter Meierjohann with immersive binaural sound design by Ben and Max Ringham. Juliet Stevenson voices the Storyteller/Doctor’s wife in this gripping story of the rise and, ultimately, profoundly hopeful end of an unimaginable global pandemic.

Blindness will be “presented” on the stage of the Princess of Wales Theatre and the audience will be seated in “pods” of pairs and single seats spaced eight-feet apart. The Princess of Wales stage is massive: 60-feet deep by 100-feet wide and 120-feet tall.“On the stage” literally means that the audience will be seated where the actors would traditionally be; the show will happen around the audience as a “sound installation.” This means there will be no actors present. The audience will follow the story solely through an incredible soundscape that includes narration by the illustrious British stage, film and tv actress Juliet Stevenson. The audience will listen to the soundscape through individual headphones that have been thoroughly sanitized.