The TNC is infected by Saramago's visionary blindness

In times of pandemic and war, José Saramago emerges as a visionary who predicted the future, although, probably, he did so unintentionally. When an unknown ailment inexplicably takes away everyone's sight, a fierce struggle for survival is unleashed, always selfish and cruel. Blindness, one of the novels that the Portuguese writer already wrote from his refuge in Lanzarote, has reaffirmed itself as one of his most universal works, incorporating terms such as confinement and state of alarm before anyone imagined they could become current again.

This is the work with which the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya (TNC) has decided to open the Sala Gran this season, coinciding with its 25th anniversary and the centenary of the birth of the Portuguese writer. "We are living through a very painful time," explains its director, Nuno Cardoso, with Saramago's blindness taking on new faces and transforming into discriminatory policies, social inequalities, hypercommunication, and an increasingly contagious loneliness. "Blindness is not a problem of the eyes, but of the heart," he emphasizes.

Assaig sobre la ceguesa has been co-produced with the Teatro Nacional São João, where it premiered with great success last June. In a commitment to the internationalization of the theater directed by Carme Portaceli, the first collaboration between the TNC and the Porto theater has also resulted in Catalan and Portuguese mixing in the play, as well as the actors, with half of the performers being Catalan and the other half, Portuguese. Ana Brandão, Ferran Carvajal, Joana Carvalho, Jordi Collet, Sérgio Sá Cunha, Montse Esteve, Paulo Freixinho, Adriana Fuertes, Gabriela Flores, Pedro Frias, Jorge Mota, Albert Prat, Lisa Reis, and Maria Ribera make up the cast.

All of this, without ceasing to take advantage of the dizzying, almost oral rhythm that characterizes the Portuguese author, with a narration without periods, linking one thought with another, jumping from the present to the past. "Saramago used to say that reading him was like going down a road where the traffic signs had been removed," says Clàudia Cedó, author of the adaptation of the novel for the TNC. "He writes in a very theatrical way," values the Catalan playwright.

The play, which lasts three hours and 20 minutes, will premiere this Thursday and can be seen until October 30 at the TNC. Then, it will travel to Braga (November 25 and 26) and Aveiro (December 3), returning again to Porto to close the tour (from December 9 to 18). Coinciding with the publication of the novel in Catalan by the Navona publishing house, a special performance will be held for booksellers, scheduled for Thursday, October 6. For those who want to know what happens when a pandemic blinds an imaginary society, Saramago continued the plot in Ensayo sobre la lucidez. In it, vision is not lost, but everyone decides to vote blank.