Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford -until 26 June 2021
Reviewed by Antonia Hebbert
4****
You know that theme-park feeling, when you’re on a ride and you’re about to be dropped from a great height and you sort of wish you hadn’t got on board in the first place? That’s a feeling that occurred to me quite often during this show.
Usually at the YA you take a comfy seat in the auditorium and admire an elaborate stage-set from a safe distance. But things are officially odd these days, and instead we were shuffled through a side door and into a high, shadowy space, with well-spaced pairs of chairs facing different ways, and coloured tube lights hanging above. Warnings were given about bangs and flashes, and heavy-duty headsets were issued. We were told (this was beginning to feel like a flight emergency) that there was a torch under the chair in case of panic. Which was enough to make you want to run for the exit.
Then through the headset came the voice of Juliet Stevenson, clear as glass and soft as velvet. She told us about a city where people were going blind, one by one, in a mysterious plague … Lights came and went. We were plunged into darkness. We had become plague victims, with Stevenson telling us about the fear, hunger and violence around us, as the only person who could still see. We heard gunshots and explosions. Very unnervingly, footsteps ran past or crept round us, and voices whispered unexpectedly in our ears.
But it was all going on inside our heads, or at least our headsets. The show is a sound installation by Simon Stephens, originally adapted for the Donmar Warehouse theatre from the dystopian novel Blindness by Jose Saramago. It’s directed by Walter Meierjohann. No spoilers, but the light, in various senses, does return. At one point towards the end we could see the space to the side filled with rows of curved lines. Good heavens, that’s the seating in the auditorium where we usually sit. Anyone with a bit more sense that me would have worked out that the space where we were sitting was the stage.
If you want a very intense theatrical event despite social distancing, this is something quite special, well worth experiencing despite being unpleasant at times. Just like that theme park ride