My cultural awakening: The Lehman Trilogy helped me to live with my sight loss
I began to notice my sight deteriorating in my 40s, but not just in the way that you expect it to with age.I had night blindness and blind spots in my field of view.At 44, I was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic eye condition that causes the retina cells to die.I had always been a very visually oriented person: I was a practising architect, and someone who loved to read, draw, go to the cinema and visit art exhibitions.So when black text disappeared on a glaring white page, films became impossible to follow and artworks only took shape once explained to me, I questioned who I would be without my vision.
Around the age of 50, I had a particularly stressful year: I got divorced; dissolved my business; started a new job; moved house; and my dad died,As my life fell off a cliff, so did my eyesight, so that by 2015 my field of vision had decreased to only 5-10 degrees (a healthy average person’s is about 200 degrees),I was registered blind, but for a long time I lived in denial, not telling anyone how much vision I had lost,At work, feeling vulnerable and like I could lose my job, I presented as fully sighted, a daily performance that became exhausting,I was in survival mode, focusing on putting one foot in front of the other, hoping I wouldn’t get found out.
I refused to see myself as disabled, and resisted using a white stick, but once I eventually did, I found people saw my disability before they saw me.I felt a total loss of identity.And I stopped doing the cultural things that once brought me joy.Three years after that terrible year, I went to the theatre for the first time since losing most of my sight.It was The Lehman Trilogy at the National Theatre in London, a play about the Lehman Brothers and the 2008 financial crash.
I assumed it would be another frustrating exercise of trying to piece together fragments and failing to follow the action that I’d come to expect whenever I went to the cinema or watched TV.But from the darkness of the circle, as the curtain went up and the three characters appeared on stage, I felt as if I’d got my vision back.The simplicity of Es Devlin’s high-contrast set design, the lighting, the three-man cast, the actors’ silhouettes, the minimal props and the rotating set was a kind of conjuring trick that meant, for the first time in years, I could actually follow what was happening.The cage-like structure on the rotating set was literally pivotal: thanks to the play’s focusing of all the action within this framing device, I didn’t have to consciously think about where to look, and worry about whether I was missing parts of the narrative.The stripped-back staging laid bare the words, the action, the story, the theatre of it.
It was total immersion with no barriers, which felt freeing.The feeling was so visceral I didn’t even realise it at the time.I was simply back to being me as I used to be.It was only afterwards that I realised how completely absorbed I had been.I’ve now seen The Lehman Trilogy three times, and at each viewing, I have been able to forget that I am partially sighted.
For those three hours and 20 minutes, I was myself again.That first viewing of The Lehman Trilogy was an epiphany, a revelation that the immediacy of live performance gave me the control – I could lock on to the action and follow it in a way that I couldn’t with other visual culture.Not every theatre production manages such complete alchemy as this, but now, pretty much every time I see a play, I become totally connected to the world created on stage.I’ve been given back not just a sense of sight but a sense of self.You can tell us how a cultural moment has prompted you to make a major life change by filling in the form below or emailing us on cultural.
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