★★★★
Another Sight is a 4-hander by Brazilian theatre group Blind Theatre. The script centres around the relationship between two women, both with cancer – Grace, who is about to start chemotherapy, and her servant Maria, who has been through the treatment. The most novel and defining aspect of this show is that it is performed in total darkness, to the extent that the door through which the audience entered was sealed with duct tape once we were seated. As the company have explained, this choice liberates blind actors to play non-blind characters and affords blind audiences a theatre-going experience in which they aren’t missing visual elements. As a sighted audience member, the darkness and actual smells circulated in the space were totally new sensory experiences in the theatre, and one that I highly recommend to anyone who has not seen a show performed in this fashion.
Experiencing the show in the dark demanded total attention and a rich imagination. One tunes into each actor’s unique footsteps and gains a heightened awareness of the spatialisation of different sounds and voices. I couldn’t help visualising the glamourous Grace sweeping dramatically through her airy apartment, or the more cramped and cluttered living space in which Maria banters with her loving partner Miguel. Knowing that every audience member was imagining the characters, costumes, and settings differently added to the magic of the darkness.
Thankfully, play itself didn’t rely on or exploit the darkness with heavy-handed evocations or significant fourth wall breaks. Indeed, my main quibble is with the cheap laughs earned by those lines performed with a knowingness of the audiences’ sensory experience (such as Robert, Grace’s husband, at one point over-emphatically exclaiming ‘what a smell!’), which weakened the diegetic distinction between the world of the play and the darkness in which we were experiencing it. Instead, the story was a delicate exploration of the pressures placed on relationships – husband-wife, employer-servant – by an illness like cancer. The emotional core of the show was the heart-melting pathos of the character Maria. It is a beautifully written and performed part: her naïve optimism, understatement of the suffering caused by the illness, determination to continue serving Grace and Robert, and love for The Beegees all combined to create a tender poignancy that carried a far greater emotional heft than a more depressingly direct approach to the subject matter might have. Whilst, understandably, a lot of the shows’ publicity centres on the in-the-dark aspect, the script, production, and performances were excellent in their own right, and in combination these elements made for a compelling theatre-going experience.
Another Sight is on at Playground 2 at ZOO Playground until August 24th.
