The lights overhead respond in kind: amber, then green. With a voice dispassionate, professional and seasoned, Stevenson begins recounting how the first man went blind while driving in traffic. But beyond its plot, the novel brilliantly captures how easily the veil of order may fall away in times of catastrophe - times when hope and love seem in short supply, and the surprising places where these two virtues might survive. The wife of an ophthalmologist, who somehow retains her sight, leads her husband and other blind survivors as they navigate a wretched landscape without food, water and other necessities. From there conditions worsen: fights over food, rape, murder. Infected individuals are forced into quarantine. In Saramago’s novel, a man inexplicably goes blind and his affliction spreads until it becomes an epidemic. A pair of headphones, sterilized and baggied, hung on the back of each chair, and through them we encountered the sole performer - the exquisite Juliet Stevenson, only in voice, though that voice turns out to be enough and then some. Fluorescent lights illuminated in electric blues, reds and yellows hung down from the ceiling in vertical and horizontal arrangements.Īnd there were no actors, at least not in the flesh. There was no stage, in the traditional sense, just the meticulous arrangement of pairs of seats in a dark room, as though we were being prepared for a big game of musical chairs.
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