The Blind

KTO's re-telling of José Saramago's novel, Blindness, starts with so much promise. A happy gang of gaily dressed couples waltz with abandon to a dizzy tune. Then one of them screams and falls, struck down by some debilitating malady, the blindness of the title, and gradually each succumbs, morphing from carefree revellers into frozen-limbed, terrified invalids. All save for one woman, marked out in red as the lone seer and burdened with the responsibility of caring for the blind. They are all packed into a sanatorium by anonymous figures in forensic white suits and left to form their own society inside.

Right, that gets the plot out of the way, which could come in handy, because the descent into Bedlam that follows could frankly mean anything. The overriding feeling watching The Blind is that trying to portray dystopian chaos through physical theatre will result in exactly that: dystopian chaos. They writhe, they bang, they fumble. The soundtrack blares out apocalyptic choral music and painful, passionate songs. It has all the trappings and trimmings of a piece custom-made to shock; women with their breasts squashed against perspex windows, women being stage-raped.

Only at two points does an electrifying coherence emerge: once when a wild tango erupts on stage, blasted by red metallic confetti, the men dragging the women like dolls; and later when it is reprised, the confetti silver and the women in control. These two short interludes alone form a far better expression of the disrupted social order than the anarchy in between.