“Three hundred pages of non-stop anguish”: thus José Saramago describes his book, an anguish devoid of sentimentality and tinged with a very dark humour. Blindness (1995) fictionalises a world where (nearly) everyone becomes blind, an epidemics that causes a discretionary power to isolate all the infected in a restricted space. In this apocalypse of the soul, where “man is a wolf to man”, Saramago displays a ravaged society’s vicious survival instinct. The culmination of a cooperative project between the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya and the Teatro Nacional São João, this stage adaptation of Saramago’s novel testifies to the universality of the Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese writer and the cross-border nature of theatrical creation. Stage director Nuno Cardoso helms an Iberian (and bilingual!) raft filled with a cast of Portuguese and Catalan actors, united in the utopian belief that the stage might solve, or else further complicate, the mysteries of this text. “The gate is wide open, and the lunatics come out.”