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| Edinburgh : A&E : Theatre: Reviews |
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Theatre listings > blind_sight
- Tour & World Premiere. Based on Guibert's cult novel, Des Aveugles, this is a gothic horror story set in a School for the Blind in Paris. In closed and institutionalised world of the school Josette and Robert build a strange almost fetishised relationship, watched by their reader who acts as narrator for the piece. In this world where Robert buys a set of bikers leathers seemingly just for its kinky feel, and Josette blinds her pet mice so it can be more like her, enters the sinister Taillegeur. Not wanting to spoil the plot suffice it to say that things unfold in a suitably gruesome fashion. The programme makes great statements about its ventures into integrating the visually impaired on stage and in the audience - "the first experiment of this type in Scotland". However it is here it really falls down. Laing opens the show by describing the set, characters and even lighting effects, but after that there's little to help. The set is placed well back on the stage, there are two TV monitors that I struggled to see, there is video projection onto the set that just makes it harder to see what is going on. While the lighting effects (which includes snapping up the house lights) had me alternately squinting and shading my eyes. Maybe this is all an attempt to disorientate the sighted and somehow impose some sort of sensory confusion, but what it achieves is increasing annoyance. Meanwhile the work on stage is equally irritating. Aaron McCusker
is a suitably suave and detached observer in the role of the Reader, but
all of the others fell well short of the mark. Nikki Cockburn as
Josette never convinces with her strangely restricted vocal delivery combined
with a stultedness of speech giving the feeling that she is reluctantly
reading in the lines for someone else. Given the depths and depravities
of her character this has the effect of removing the guts from the piece. I'd high hopes this show would let me see, or be part of, an approach
to theatre bring together the best of contemporary practice combined with
a different awareness that working with, and about, the visually impaired
could bring. I hoped for an example of how to create engaging theatre,
enjoyable and accessible both to the sighted and visually impaired. Ultimately
it fails at both. So I recommend that anyone, who has ever thought theatre
could be enjoyable for special needs groups as well as a mainstream audience,
goes to see it. Not to enjoy, but in the hope the anger it causes might
spur you into doing something better. Theatre listings >
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