What’s it like to be blind? Terrifying one-person performance Blindness takes away audience’s sense of sight

Showing at the Hong Kong Arts Festival, Blindness starts in light before plunging its audience into darkness, using 3D audio to unnerving effect

It was created by Tony Award-winning playwright Simon Stephens, best known for adapting the popular novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

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Audience members participate in Blindness, a gripping story of the rise and, ultimately, profoundly hopeful end of an unimaginable global pandemic. Photo: Helen Maybanks

Published: 4:15pm, 6 Apr 2021Updated: 4:15pm, 6 Apr 2021

We’ve all been kept in the dark. We’ve all been traumatised – for who knows how much longer? – by an invisible terror that has suspended everyday life and forced us to grope for answers in the void.

But if it helps to try to give the enemy form, there’s a performance you should see (or not), and in which you should participate (however inadvertently). It takes place on a stage, but isn’t a play, and all indications point to it having been written to order for our continuing crisis. Except – in the curious incident of the show for the dark times – it wasn’t.

In 1995, Portuguese author and Nobel Laureate José Saramago published Blindness, an allegorical novel about the unravelling of society caused by a contagion: sight loss.

In the book (later filmed), an entire population is cast into darkness (or whiteness, which amounts to the same thing) and further beset by depravity. Lacking one of their senses, humans are suddenly unable to interact in their accustomed ways. Transport systems crumble, financial institutions totter and confidence in a government proven to be lying evaporates.

Sound familiar? The Hong Kong Arts Festival will experience something similar from April 15 with the arrival of Tony Award-winning playwright Simon Stephens’ adaptation of the novel.