Ensaio sobre a cegueira

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“Three hundred pages of non-stop anguish”, as José Saramago described it, an anguish devoid of sentimentality and tinged with a very black humour. “Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira” [Blindness] (1995) fictionalises a world where (nearly) everyone becomes blind, an epidemic 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 of 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 pf Portuguese and Catalan actors united in the utopian belief that the stage might solve or else further complicate the mysteries of this text. “The gates open wide, and the lunatics come out.”