Blindness/The Nightline

Queen’s Theatre

Adelaide Festival

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

 

It’s a somewhat surreal experience to be in Adelaide again staying with friends and attending events at the Festival after having spent the last two years of the pandemic in the gilded cage of Western Australia. I even brought my collapsible bicycle on the plane so I could traverse the streets of the Adelaide CBD (a somewhat post-apocalyptic landscape at the best of times) in or around which most of the Festival is located.  

 

It was even stranger to travel (or rather cycle) further back in time a few days ago and make my way to the Queen’s Theatre: the oldest intact theatre in mainland Australia (though not as old as the Theatre Royal in Hobart). Unlike the Royal, however, which has been in continuous operation as a theatre, the Queen’s has long been eviscerated and variously used as a dance hall, city mission, horse bazaar, sales yard, livery, stables, forge, factory, warehouse, showroom and carpark. The shell of the building was first used again as a venue for a production of The Magic Flute in 1996, and subsequently a production of Natural Life directed by Michael Kantor in 1998, in which my friend and colleague Humphrey Bower once appeared in clown makeup and cricket whites. 

 

To make things even more uncanny, I had returned to the Queen’s for two immersive installation-theatre works that deal with mass illness and isolation. The first was a matinee of the Donmar Warehouse production of Blindness – an adaptation of Portuguese writer José Saramago’s novel about a mysterious epidemic of blindness and subsequent social collapse that afflicts an entire country – staged in semi-darkness with the audience seated in rows of separate pairs of chairs and wearing headphones. The second was a late-night performance of director Rosalyn Oades and sound artist Bob Scott’s new production The Nightline – a verbatim theatre work using hundreds of voice messages left on a designated message bank between midnight and 6am over the past 2 years – also involving material related to isolation, illness and death, and also staged in semi-darkness, with the audience seated in rows of separate individual tables and using old fashioned telephones. The two works were staged in two different semi-derelict spaces within the same ruined building, and for both performances we gathered outside on the corner of Gillies Arcade and Playhouse Lane wearing our masks and waited to check in with our QR codes and have our proofs of vaccination sighted before showing our tickets and being herded inside.

 

Blindness has been adapted by British playwright Simon Stephens and directed by Walter Meierjohann, and features the recorded voice of Juliet Stevenson, with a sound design (using binaural recording and headphones) by Ben and Max Ringham, immersive set design by Lizzie Clachan and lighting design by Jessica Hun Han Yun. Apparently the production was first staged at the Donmar in the summer of 2020 – when it was one of the first theatres in London to reopen – and was created specifically for pandemic conditions, with a maximum of two tickets per transaction, physically distanced pairs of seats, and only couples from the same household or social bubble seated together. All of this must have felt very strange to Londoners back then; as for myself, having since been in multiple theatres with fluctuating restrictions of various kinds (especially in WA), and now in a different phase of the pandemic (and in Adelaide), I found myself somewhat uncertain about protocol (or even where I was). How freely should I move around or make physical contact with objects or people? Should I touch or hug any friends I came across? What difference did it make to any of these questions being here, away from home, in Adelaide, now?

 

I found myself even more uncertain about the choice of material. Did I really want to immerse myself in a story about another pandemic, when I feel as if I’ve been living in a dystopian novel for the last two years? More specifically, what does this particular story mean, here, now? Saramago’s novel was first published in 1995 and is set in an unnamed city; but I found myself thinking about Portugal’s long years of military dictatorship under Salazar, and blindness as a metaphor, much like in Camus’s The Plague. Obviously neither of these novels is really about a pandemic at all. It’s no accident that the first person to be struck blind in Saramago’s novel is in a traffic jam, and that the next victim is a car-thief who steals his car; one of the main characters is a doctor, like in The Plague; and one of the major themes in both novels is the classic existential question of responsibility. Of course this question (along with the question of freedom) is still with us, here, now – in the context of Covid, obviously, but also with war unfolding in the Ukraine – as well as other questions: about individualism, but also about militarism and fascism. On the other hand, Covid is a real disease, and not just a metaphor. 

 

In fact I found the content of the novel the least interesting aspect of the production, particularly once it (all-too-soon) became an (all-too-familiar) dystopian story about social breakdown. I was more interested in what the experience of blindness might reveal to me in performance. Disappointingly, this experience was continually disrupted by an overhead cage of neon lights that fluctuated in colour and intensity, and then descended to just above our heads – once the dystopian cage of the story set in, and the main characters found themselves quarantined in a former asylum – after which it continued to flash and assert itself in various ways periodically throughout the performance. How much more theatrically effective and transformative it would have been to sit and listen to the story collectively in socially distanced darkness.

 

Aurally things were more interesting, especially when Stevenson’s voice came closer and moved around me thanks to the miraculous possibilities of binaural sound. However these possibilities were barely explored once they had been introduced; and (all-too-soon) her vocal performance become over-emotional and shouty once she had shifted from the role of omniscient narrator to that of first-person present-tense speaker in the character of the Doctor’s Wife. I found this transition and device dramaturgically clumsy as it inevitably raised the question of why I couldn’t hear any other voices; it also coincided with the use of increasingly literal sound-effects and soundtrack music; and I began to feel more like I was listening to a poorly adapted audio book or radio play. Again, how much more interesting it would have been to simply sit and listen to her narrate the story. 

 

In the end what interested me most was the venue and the way it was used: its sense of history and dilapidated state (far more evocative than any cage of neon lights); sitting wherever I chose among rows of chairs facing in different directions (and having no one sit next to me); the presence of others around me (whether visible or not); the process of entering and taking my seat, and (especially) leaving – towards the end of the story, curtains were simply pulled aside at one end of the space, revealing a large open doorway like a garage, with daylight streaming in, and pedestrians in the street outside simply walking past. I was also intrigued by certain curious installations scattered around the walls: a bed with a mattress and faded covers; two rows of letters printed or traced on another wall saying, ‘IF YOU CAN SEE, LOOK / IF YOU CAN LOOK, OBSERVE.’ How much more interesting – and how much more important in our own era of ‘blindness’ – it would have been to be able to simply follow those instructions: to see, to look, to observe. 

 

*

 

Later that night I came back and saw The Nightline. On every level – concept, text, performance, sound, lighting, staging – this was a much more interesting work. Again, we were ushered into a (smaller) dilapidated space, this time by a severe looking ‘concierge’ (Katia Molino), who instructed us not to speak and then took a seat at a small table overlooking us, like an invigilator. We made our own way through rows of similar tables and chairs like a classroom or examination hall and sat where we chose; each table was softly lit by a table-lamp beside an old-fashioned telephone, which was connected via a plug-in cable to a kind of switchboard with multiple outlets. Otherwise the space was dimly illuminated by lights in corners or high window ledges (excellent lighting design by Fausto Brusamolino). The concierge demonstrated (via mime) how we were to plug and unplug the cable and lift the telephone receiver, and then left us to our devices, occasionally glancing at a large book or sipping coffee from a thermos flask.

 

Other than that, it was over to us. Each plug-in channel played a different voice leaving a different message through the receiver, followed by another voice leaving another message. The messages were short (about two or three minutes each) and were from shift workers, insomniacs, young or old, sick or infirm, isolated or bereft, at home or on the road, sharing memories or feelings, sometimes calling more than once or commencing with ‘It’s me again’, and often ending with something like: ‘Anyway, thanks for listening!’

 

Occasionally the sound fluctuated, or became uniform across all channels, or came through speakers surrounding the space, or was intercut or interrupted by other sounds, like soft music, an engaged signal, or torrential rain. Occasionally the lights fluctuated, or went on or off, singly or collectively, illuminating the space in different ways, or revealing different patterns of tables and people. At one point the concierge made a slow and dramatically lit exit via the entrance door, and later returned, for no apparent reason. At the end of the performance, which went for about 40 minutes, the sound simply died away, the lights came up, the door opened, and we left.

 

The work had no overarching narrative or underlying message – except perhaps for that repeated coda: ‘Thanks for listening.’ We had agency – everyone had their own experience, visually and especially sonically – but we also had a shared experience that was carefully curated and framed. I heard no reference to the pandemic – to any pandemic – or to any national or world events; yet the work spoke to me deeply about being here, now.

 

*

 

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer, critic and non-conceptual artist based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. He is editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.