Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira

We revive Blindness as the commemorations of José Saramago’s Centenary draw to a close. Nuno Cardoso’s staging returns to Porto, after travelling to Barcelona, Braga and Aveiro. How many cities can host this National Theatre? How many stages can present celebrations of the Portuguese language, here sharing the limelight with Catalan? And how many actors are able to get in and out of the skin of several characters, in a spinning wheel of constantly-mutating voices and bodies? Blindness sees the city as a place that must rise again out of the ruins of our inhumanity. This production celebrates the cosmopolitanism of Saramago, a writer of Portugal and the world at large, and of the national theatres of Porto and Catalonia, who accepted, and fulfilled, the challenge of letting themselves be surprised by difference. “To cosmopolitanise” is a verb that must be conjugated in the future tense. “Without a future, the present is useless.”