IT’S LIKE JULIET’S WHISPERING IN YOUR EAR
NOR did I care much for the other central players, including her daughter Zara (Daisy Edgar-Jones), who is a selfabsorbed Cambridge graduate.
Her falling in love with her mother’s writer friend Katherine (Helen Schlesinger) feels like a contrivance. And despite Audrey’s 36-year friendship with Katherine, it turns out she knows astonishingly little about her BFF.
And then there’s Anna (Angel Coulby), the bonkers fiancée of the dead son who threatens Audrey with various kinds of emotional blackmail.
The minor characters are more pleasing, including a swainish youth (Donal Finn) who fancies the daughter; and Audrey’s husband (Nicholas rowe), who is an affable slacker.
Miriam Buether’s staging was celebrated for its enormous tree, spreading over an oval lawn and herbaceous border. But on screen, it feels more cramped than intimate and rupert Goold’s
AT COVENT Garden’s Donmar Warehouse they’ve found a canny way of working with government restrictions on live performance. They are now showing Walter Meierjohann’s pre-recorded staging of Jose Saramago’s novel, about a global pandemic of blindness, four times a day.
The audience sit singly or in pairs (with someone from their ‘bubble’) in the empty studio theatre and, curiously enough, the now routine rigmarole of masking up and hand sanitising on the way in chimes nicely with the martial law of the story.
The auditorium is pitch black, to make us share the experience of blindness; though occasionally overhead lights flash on to prevent us from adapting to the darkness.
But the really clever thing is the way the hour-long dystopian melodrama is relayed through tight-fitting headphones, using a voiceover by Juliet Stevenson.
She plays the only sighted woman in this bleak new world, and we are made to feel like one of the captives she is trying to save from the authorities.
Stevenson is in full thespian mode, nailing the last consonant of each word, and running the gamut from tearful despair to breathy pleasure at finding a stash of chorizo and black bread while out scavenging.
Playwright Simon Stephens’s adaptation reinforces the apocalyptic mood, with Stevenson’s monologue written in tough Methodist monosyllables.
There are bumps and shrieks along the way, but the weirdly intimate twist is having the actress whispering in your ear. It’s as though she’s in the room ... right beside you.
I confess I lifted my headphones a couple of times to check she wasn’t.