My Cultural Awakening: The Lyman Trilogy Helped Me Cope with My Vision Loss | culture

I I started to notice my vision deteriorating in my 40s, but just not in the way you’d expect with age. I was suffering from night blindness and blind spots in my field of vision. When I was 44, I was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic eye condition that causes retinal cells to die. I have always been a very visually oriented person: I was a practicing architect, and someone who loved to read, draw, go to the cinema and visit art galleries. So, as black text disappeared onto a stark white page, movies became impossible to follow, and artworks only took shape as they were explained to me, I wondered who I would be without my vision.

When I was about 50, I went through a particularly stressful year: I got divorced; Practical solution. I started a new job; mobile house; And my father died. As my life fell off a cliff, so did my eyesight, and by 2015 my field of vision had dropped to only 5 to 10 degrees (the average healthy person’s field of vision is about 200 degrees). I was registered as blind, but for a long time I lived in denial, never telling anyone about the extent of my vision loss. At work, I felt weak and like I might lose my job, I performed blindly every day, and I became exhausted. I was in survival mode, focusing on putting one foot in front of the other, hoping not to be discovered. I refused to see myself as disabled, and I resisted using a white cane, but when I finally did, I found that people saw my disability before they saw me. I felt a complete loss of identity. I stopped doing the cultural things that once brought me happiness.

Three years after that terrible year, I went to the theater for the first time since I lost most of my sight. It was the Lehman Trilogy at the National Theater in London, a play about Lehman Brothers and the financial collapse of 2008. I assumed it would be another frustrating exercise in trying to put the pieces together and failing to follow the action I expected whenever I went to the cinema or watched television. But from the darkness of the circle, as the curtain rose and the three figures appeared on the stage, I felt as if I had regained my vision.

The simplicity of Es Devlin’s high-contrast design, the lighting, the cast of three, the silhouettes of the actors, the minimal props and the rotating set was a kind of magic trick that meant, for the first time in years, I could actually follow what was happening. The cage-like structure of the rotating set was literally pivotal: thanks to the play’s focus on all the action within this framing device, I didn’t have to consciously think about where to look, or worry about whether I was missing parts of the narrative. The abstract theatrical performance revealed the words, the event, the story, and the stage.

It was complete immersion without any barriers, which made me feel liberated. The feeling was so deep that I didn’t realize it at the time. I simply went back to being myself as I was before. Only then did I realize the full extent of my understanding. I’ve watched Lehmann’s trilogy three times, and each time I’ve been able to forget that I’m visually impaired. For those twenty-three hours and minutes, I was myself again.

That first viewing of Lehman’s trilogy was an epiphany, a revelation that the immediacy of live performance gave me control—that I could latch on to the action and follow it in a way I couldn’t with other visual culture. Not every theater production manages such perfect chemistry, but now, almost every time I see a play, I become completely connected to the world created on stage. I was given back not only my sense of sight but my sense of self.