Synopsis:

“It’s three hundred pages of constant affliction,” as José Saramago described it, an affliction free of sentimentality and tinged with very black humor. Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira (1995) fictionalizes a world where (almost) everyone goes blind, an epidemic that leads a discretionary power to isolate the infected in a closed space. In this apocalypse of the soul, where “man is the wolf of man”, Saramago exposes the brutality of a devastated social body’s desire to survive. 

The culmination of the cooperation project between the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya and the Teatro Nacional São João, the stage adaptation of Saramago’s novel is emblematic of the universality of the Portuguese Nobel laureate and the cross-border nature of the theatrical act. Director Nuno Cardoso directs an Iberian (and bilingual!) raft, with Portuguese and Catalan actors united in the utopia that the stage will solve or add to the mysteries of this text. “The gate is wide open, the madmen come out.”