Creating BLINDNESS
With installations up and running, Donmar Resident Assistant Director Sara Aniqah Malik arranged a Zoom call with Director Walter Meierjohann to discuss the process behind the installation from conception to realisation. Here are his reflections on bringing Blindness to the Donmar in these unusual times.
Why did you want to adapt Blindness?
I was assisting the prominent German Director Klaus Michael Grueber, on Aida in Amsterdam in 1999, who was very influential in my career. His vision of theatre was very sensual, in a way. In all his performances there was something dark, really dark, but lively at the same time. And I assisted him twice in opera. I was 27 when I read the novel and I was so in love with this Director’s work that I gave him the novel as a premier — opening night — gift because I felt like: if someone could do this, it would be him. I was 27 and I thought I could never stage it. Hovever, he never got back to me. I got older and realised I should be doing this myself.
My original vision of this was the opposite of what we’re doing right now at the Donmar. I envisioned it as a mainstage production with a hundred people onstage. What spoke to me so much was that I saw the Greek drama in it. I think Greek drama is defined by the speaking to the polis — you speak to your own community. With a massive, massive epic story which tells the story of the community you live in in that moment. And that’s the polis for me. I saw that in Saramago.
In my early thirties, I was the head of a new writing company within the State Theatre of Dresden. I was granted the rights to stage it but I didn’t have the writer attached. The artistic director of the whole theatre said it was too bleak. The reason I wanted to do it in Dresden was because in 2004 you could already sense the right wing rising. So, the blindness, to me, was the rise in right wing fascism in Germany.
Then I moved to London and in 2008 saw the collapse of the financial system. The new blindness to me was the crisis of capitalism. Fast forward to 2016 we had the Brexit vote. I had been appointed Artistic Director of HOME in Manchester three years earlier and I felt like we were entering dark times once again. Everything I admired in Britain — the tolerance — suddenly turned on its head. I felt a mood change. The mood change is like an epidemic. An epidemic of nationalism that spreads like a virus. That’s what Britain felt like to me in 2016. A year after I opened the building, I commissioned Simon Stephens to write an adaptation.
What did Simon bring to the process in his adaptation?
I had asked Simon to adapt the opening show of HOME in 2015, The Funfair. He did a fantastic job and I have always admired his sparse writing. And of course Simon’s work is very dark. It was really interesting because when we spoke about Blindness, he said he’d never heard of it. Then when he read it he said there were three novels that changed his life and this was one of them.
He understands structure. I’m a Director who is quite instinctual. I had this massive piece at 300 pages, and I’m not good at reducing.
Simon’s first take was filtering that through.
He didn’t re-write so much; what he did was structure it into three parts — which made a lot of sense — and he reduced it.
That was his major achievement — he turned it into a play with 11 characters and a chorus of 100 extra blind people. And of course the rewrites he did were stunning. After working on the first draft in a workshop at the National Theatre Studio he said to me: instead of 100 can you imagine 1?
I couldn’t see that. But I thought: give it a go, Simon. We didn’t have a theatre attached so there was no project, in a way. There was just the workshop, and later this conversation happened. And Simon went ahead with it. We got the draft much later in November 2019.
[laughing] It would take a psychotherapist 20 sessions to go through all the visions I’ve had with this play!
What does it mean to produce Blindness during our current pandemic?
I had the book with me during lockdown and I thought this really was the time to re-read it. But I didn’t want to. There is a really big distinction between imagining something and being in something. Being in a pandemic.
Then Simon got in touch saying we have the rights. I thought: this changes everything.
I made a note, re-reading it: is there an audio version? This was before Mike Longhurst got in touch suggesting an audio installation.
I said to my wife: I’m not going to work for the next 18 months. But then that phone call happened.
I was an artistic director before and seeing how Mike manoeuvred himself and how he brought people back from furlough… I found it incredibly moving that someone is here trying to bring back the arts in some form.
What was it like to rehearse during lockdown?
Simon wrote to us after he saw the show: individually you are all great and together, you are unbeatable. That is the process of theatre. You can sit in your room and you can imagine something. It’s a collaborative process. Brecht calls them the sister arts — lights, sound, music, set design. He says they have a strong bond. The biggest achievement is the sense of ensemble — togetherness. It’s the same with coordinating the artistic team. You have to bring the right people together to bring a conceptual approach to the text. I’m very proud of managing those voices and ideas into one voice. That is artistic.
Why did you feel that Juliet Stevenson would be the right actor for this unique project?
Before we did a workshop at the National Theatre studio in March 2019, I remembered her and suddenly thought: is she available? I remember seeing her when I was a student in Berlin and I thought: she can be so tender but also really hard. And I thought that versatility is needed for Blindness.
Juliet Stevenson is a goddess anyway — we knew that. And we knew she was going to give an extraordinary performance as the sole voice. We just needed a form that was going to reflect the story. Like a triptych — it’s one story in three different forms.
This is one of the most exciting bits of working on the project. The medium we chose was a reflection of the three-part structure Simon had written. To say, technological choices are reflecting the author’s view. We came close to giving the audience the experience of reading the novel. You enter the world of Saramago’s writing; you can smell the horror. Using the binaural, we felt like we were there with her.
The thing you and I talked a lot about was that I didn’t want to do terror pornography, to celebrate suffering. But after reading reviews and watching it alongside other visitors, I realised you do need the darkness to climb to the hope at the end. And the rain is that symbol.
I’ve never worked on something where I was so intrigued by the encounter we had as an artistic team. Something developed where we didn’t quite know what this artwork was.
I loved coming into work not knowing how it was all going to be shaped in the end. Here, we were faced with conceptual problems.
What was it like working with Juliet and the binaural sound?
We worked with one of the most astonishing actors, who has the most extraordinary knowledge of recording, and with the fantastic Ringham brothers who have shaped Simon’s adaptation into a piece of audio magic. That in a way made it much easier for me. It took me a day, a day and a half to understand the technology. It really felt like catching up. I knew that we had to constantly zoom in and out. I had done radio plays before but this was like a film shoot.
My concern was that we were too minimal. Do we have enough sound language? But then also when we did the sound of her in blankets, when she speaks to the injured man. I wondered if it was too literal. Ben and Max Ringham guided us.
It felt very collaborative. I hadn’t done thirty binaural shows.
But what I felt I brought to the project was to get all theatre out of Juliet. She’s a great stage actress. But it’s like film in that anything theatrical feels like a lie. When she did the take when she shouts at the men in the ward, she went into a rage. It was one of the most astonishing takes, but it damaged her voice. But in a way it tells the story of how she suffered in that asylum. As we carried on recording we were worried her voice before sounded too clean. I learnt a lot about giving her the one or two minutes before doing a take because she really needed to see that scene in order to express the psychology of that. That’s why we love actors.
And one of the big things was that she didn’t have a partner. She had mainly the dummy head microphone to interact with. There were other characters in the space and she had to imagine them. I remember two takes: one with Jessica Hung Han Yun, our lighting designer, standing in for the woman with the dark glasses and then yourself as well. You can hear the difference when she talks to someone in the space. Even with an artist of her calibre, it’s astonishing what a human presence does to an actor’s directness.
What was it like working with the designer Lizzie Clachan?
She really pushed me conceptually. Her seating arrangement is genius. Utter genius. Her idea that there would be across-dialogue with the audience was astonishing. And the lights coming down was Lizzie’s contribution. She was also very open. The writing on the back wall was my idea but she was also saying it’s a good idea. It’s testimony to how we worked. In the same way the sound designers Ben and Max Ringham would acknowledge that without Jess’ lighting design, it wouldn’t work. It’s an audio and light installation. Is this a way forward in theatre? For the next 12 months? Imagine we told stories that are recorded… but also in the empty space. Through lights?
What did you learn from speaking with our Production Consultant Professor Hannah Thompson?
We are caught in clichés in how we use language. She describes ‘Blindness Gain’ which turns everything on its head.
In her blog post she said sitting in utter darkness for her felt like a liberation.
Art can show empathy and show a different perspective on how we live. When she talks about walking with her sighted husband and that she can see more than him — I loved that conversation. We could have spoken for days. Even that one hour felt very good. Why are you a theatre practitioner? What does it mean? If you’re not in a position of wanting to learn something, there’s no point in doing it. That excites me.
I was initially worried about the conversation with Hannah would be a Saramago bashing. But it was really important to hear what this novel means within the blind community. It definitely has made me much more sensitive to other projects I would do now, if they were speaking about a community that I wouldn’t know about. I think she wanted to get away from victimhood.
What I got from Hannah was that she’s born like this and that she has the right to live her life to the fullest and not feel discriminated against with labels which she doesn’t want to accept. I was impressed by how the Donmar brought her on board and a testament to collaboration.
How was tech week for you?
[laughing] I was so grateful not to have the 15 minutes in and out of costume for the actors!
I knew this tech was going to be mainly about lighting because I knew the sound file had to be nearly ready.
My notes to Jess and the Ringham brothers were: you guys have got to sync up. The story comes from the audio. Every musical note had to trigger something in the lighting. Not the other way around. I knew that but I didn’t know it had to be so closely linked.
Having two previews in one day was madness. But on the other hand, we could respond between shows. But we were still cutting down the text. We had pages of notes but we couldn’t implement them because we didn’t have time. The learning curve altogether is that we need 2 weeks rehearsal and 10 days to edit the audio. It is actually like a theatrical production. But I don’t think we knew that.
What do you hope audiences experience when they come to Blindness?
When my wife came to see it, she used the word cathartic. I was really happy about that. You can walk out of this and say: our epidemic isn’t as bad. The word catharsis means that you have to grow through the dark period in order to show the extremes of what human beings can do to each other in a negative way. But also recognising the extremes of what people can do to each other in a good way.
I hope that after 3 and a half months of lockdown, we have achieved something together. What will we remember of this time? I think what will stick out… is a show of solidarity. It shows the human spirit. I hope the vision you leave with is of this small group of people who live together in the flat. Simon always said this is a really optimistic story and I always thought [chuckling] oh my god!
The more I listen to it, the more I see it is in a way. You see it in Beirut and the anger to the politicians — at the same time you see young people sweeping the streets. That’s the human spirit. People helping each other. Death, horror, and at the same time a counter narrative.
Blindness runs at the Donmar Warehouse from 1 August — 5 September 2020. For more information visit donmarwarehouse.com
