Stephens' pared-back script was "brilliant," says Stevenson; "At that stage, we thought it would be quite a surreal production, where I'd have to play all the other people in it," she says. But then Covid shut down all of London's theatres and the production was put on pause – until Michael Longhurst, artistic director of Covent Garden's Donmar Warehouse, had a novel idea. "He said, 'Did I hear you guys were doing a one-woman play? Do you think it would work as a sound installation?'"
Which is how, instead of working with 24 other actors, Stevenson ended up performing opposite a fibreglass head, fixed with two microphones where eardrums would be, which recorded 360 degree sound to create a fully-immersive experience for the listener – a technology known as binaural recording, created for this show by sound-design duo The Ringham Brothers.
"When you listen to the show, I literally am walking around you, or or crawling on the floor, or running over there, or shouting out through a window; you experience her, the character, completely three-dimensionally," says Stevenson. "When I went to see the first preview I sat there with my headphones on and there's a moment where I'm walking very slowly around, so people are thinking I'm walking in a tight circle. I pulled in my feet, so as to not tip myself over. That's how you sink into the reality of it."
The challenge of carrying the entire script on her own – let alone one as nerve-shredding and intense as Blindness – was one that thrilled Stevenson. For one scene, in which her character is trying to block a stampede of people trying to cram into a hospital, Stevenson realised she had to somehow convey the sound of a panicked, crowded room entirely on her own.
"I saw a whole pile of cheap metal chairs stacked in the [rehearsal] room," she says. "I said to the Ringham Brothers, 'Let me try something.' They started recording and I just started screaming and screaming at these people coming in. As I was screaming, 'You can't come in here, you can't come in here, we're already full, we're already full,' I grabbed this pile of chairs and, one by one, I pulled them off and threw them up one end of the room quickly, one after the other, banging into each other, banging on the floor, then I went and pushed them all together and tried to stack them up in the corner. And then I finished and I said, 'Okay, let's play that back and see what it sounds like.' It was amazing."
Stevenson was surprised that, despite the parallels with the Covid-19 pandemic, audiences seemed somewhat "consoled" by the show. "Though the existing world is sort of destroyed, what Saramago is looking at at the end is: are there not other ways to live? What if something happened to the world which really affected everyone equally and at the end, we had to think, 'How do we begin life again when all the old forms are gone?'"
It leaves Stevenson reflecting on the year that has passed, more of which she has spent in lockdown than not. The day before our conversation, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the UK's "road map" out of the seemingly interminable lockdown it has been in since December, with a staggered reopening of schools, shops, gyms, pubs and venues put in place; a slow recalibration of so-called "normal life".
"In the first lockdown, there was a lot of talk about, 'Let's not rebuild as we did before, let's learn from this.' It was quite idealistic," she says. "I don't hear that anymore. I keep hearing, 'I can't wait to get back to Ibiza.' The idealism of the first lockdown doesn't seem to be with us anymore."
She doesn't blame people: Stevenson is exhausted too. On top of caring for her 96-year-old mother, Stevenson hasn't been able to hug her children or her grandson in almost a year. She's desperate to see her family and return to her acting community, but is also trying to be grateful for the things she's learned since Covid hit.
"Everything we took for granted has been taken away," she says. "The one enormous gift of that is that we now understand the value of all the component parts our lives are made up of. You don't understand something until it's taken away from you. The ill person doesn't understand what good health means until it's taken away or you may not appreciate somebody well enough until they die and you learn at their funeral what kind of person they were and you think, 'S***, I wish I'd known them better.' For some reason it's only when you lose something you really grow to understand its value. It's very, very humbling."
Throughout lockdown, Stevenson feels as though she began to see the world through new eyes. "Everything's a miracle. It doesn't have to be in a beautiful place. You can walk down a back alley and see the way a dustbin lid rolls down the street in a wind, you know, everything has value." But as someone who constantly thinks of herself in relation to others – an actor, a daughter, a mother – Stevenson found herself grappling with her own identity.
"I'm not really anybody until I'm with people. When you can't act, you can't be a parent, you can't do the things that make up who you are, what's left? It's been the most strange, challenging, personally challenging time.
"Especially as a woman," she continues. "I have always been a working mother, so there isn't a lot of time to think about, 'Who am I?' I don't do anything for myself much. I'm not good at tai chi or yoga or having 'me-time'. So this has been quite strange, stopping. It's the first time I've ever stopped in my whole life."
As with most people in creative industries, the pandemic derailed Stevenson's year of work. As Covid was spreading, she was in Australia with her play The Doctor, a project she's immensely proud of that was supposed to travel on to Broadway. ("It was a really bad year's work to have to lose," she laughs. "Some years I wouldn't mind losing the whole year, but last year was going to be really fantastic.") But when she thinks about the year that was 2020, Stevenson is optimistic.
"If somebody was to ask, 'Would you wave a wand and go back a year and not have any of this happen?' Of course I would wave that wand, because of all the people who've lost their lives. It's heartbreaking," she says. "But on the other hand, there's a way in which life happens. What I say to my kids is, it's not so much what happens to you, it's how you deal with what happens to you. That's where you learn in life. I think that everybody's learned loads and I think it'll take us a while to discover what we've learned, as well. The penny will go on dropping for a long time."
The New Zealand premiere of Blindness - Auckland Writers Festival, from Tuesday, May 11.
writersfestival.co.nz
