Leyre Berrocal and Josema Gómez , Spanish version.
“The Eyes of the Night” features two people, Lucía, a successful business woman and Angel, a blind man who stands on a street corner selling lottery tickets. She has ‘hired’ him to accompany her to an hotel, she claims, to talk. Lucia’s behaviour follows little logic, she wants to leave the hotel room but she cannot, decides to leave and cannot and in the end appears to be trapped, although she has her sight. Trapped, largely because she has been unable to rise above her situation and face it, she has avoided these decisions all her life, lived a loveless marriage, a successful career and yet she feels lost. There is as much terror in being unloved as there is in the realization that she also cannot love. We do not know why she has taken this course of action and it takes a while before the darkness of her thoughts is revealed.
She has realised that she has everything but she has nothing. The audience is teased about why she would have picked up a blind man and booked them both into an expensive hotel, he assumes sex, she is adamant it is not, she wants to talk… but we can all see she is lying… what she wants is obscured, hidden even from herself, as she struggles with her anguish and pain. She is unable to be truthful; woven into the small talk, the long silences are pregnant with unanswered questions and Angel feels humiliated by her attitude towards him. As she taunts him for being blind, he replies: “You don’t need to see, to know what a person is like”.
“I am dead” she says. “The dead do not talk” is his reply, thus undermining the premise of their meeting.
It takes a while before we are aware of her true intentions and even then, we can see she is torn apart by her feelings and inability to be even remotely true to herself. It was notable that in this production the lighting, by Nigel A Lewis, was particularly sensitive and complemented the emotional content.
Lanna Joffrey and Samuel Brewer, English version.
The Eyes of the Night is part of the Spanish Contemporary Season at the Cervantes Theatre that aims to highlight women authors. Paloma Pedrero is a more than suitable candidate. She could be considered the most prolific female playwright of the 21st Century with over 30 plays translated into over 20 languages. She first hit the stage in 1985 with her first play ‘La Llamada de Lauren’(Lauren’s Call) and she never looked back. She is rightly irritated by the difficulties of female writers trying to enter a very male world in Spain so it is notable that she was awarded the Exhibition of Contemporary Spanish Playwrights in 2005 and more recently, in July 2017, she was named “World theatre Ambassador” by UNESCO.
As she says:
“This is a play written from the inside out… it has something to do with the sensations I felt of the struggles I had to experience as an author and as a woman, to be able to exist in a man’s world, which is the world of dramaturgy in Spain. In a sense I have been a pioneer in this universe… I have had to fight to open my way renouncing many things… although in the end … I had a son, and have done things I thought I could not do and I suppose I could say that it’s true that at this point in my life, I feel I have finally arrived … but I have to ask it if it was worthwhile…and the answer is YES, because it is possible to recuperate your motherhood, your tenderness… I suppose, I am partly the character of Lucia in the play, but there are other things that emerged … after my first play, I was labelled ‘ perverse’ , a ’ bad person’, a brute for having the gall [to question]… what’s that little blond woman doing being so perverse to talk about the identity of men… what does she know… well… plenty… as men like to talk a lot about themselves… Once, men played all the roles of women, and only in the 19th century actresses became necessary, although initially women were… the sister of…, the wife of… the lover of… the mother of… never the protagonist. In Spain he first woman who managed to open in an important theatre in the 1980s was Ana Diosdado (1938-2015). When we met, she hugged me… a comrade at last!”
Pedrero wrote “The Eyes of the Night” over 20 years ago and had not revisited it until she watched it again on the opening night at the Cervantes Theatre.
“I cannot lie! I have lived a powerful experience and am in a state of shock. These things… I have written them? I am amazed. Independently of the fact that the actors have done a fantastic job, it is an extremely difficult play. Two persons face each other in a surrealistic situation … the level of despair that the woman has in that situation … there is nothing to hang onto… the text is almost an excuse… it is a pre-text…. It is the most difficult play I have written because what they actually say is not the truth… I now have the feeling that I threw them into a huge void and there they are… falling from that 22nd floor … and it’s all my fault because I wrote it! There is so much that is unsaid… and what is not spoken is so important… we live in a world where pharmaceuticals are the biggest business, we are made crazy with this, sick from stress, sick from pain, sick from a lack of love… and this play talks about that.”
Paloma Pedrero
Paloma Pedrero was born with myopia. At three years of age she was already wearing glasses and by the time she was fourteen, her glasses had the thick lenses for severe myopia, so she is acutely aware of what it is like to be visually impaired. The two actors playing Angel, in the English and Spanish versions, are in reality also visually-impaired themselves, thereby bringing a powerful authenticity to their performances. This was no make-believe, there was a hard truth to it as well and the audience picks up on that to full effect. As Samuel Brewer expressed at the Q & A: -
“Many actors need jobs and are not getting in the room because they are a person of colour, or disabled or LGBTQ so characters in plays like this are not available to them. I have people saying, ‘You got the job because you are visually impaired.’ No, I got the role because I am a f…. good actor!”
The Eyes of the Night was expertly translated into English by Catherine Boyd. When you use other languages in a text, different energies and elements come to the fore. In the case of ‘The Eyes of the Night’, for instance, in the Spanish version , Lucía (Leyre Berrocal) comes across as a live wire; brittle, anxious to the point of disintegration, cutting and profoundly intolerant of others and herself. The blind man, Ángel (played by Josema Gómez) on the other hand, comes across as laid back, more compassionate and warm, but nevertheless tough and equally intolerant of being humiliated or used. In the English version, Lucía (Lanna Joffrey) is full of despair, but rather than brittle, she comes across as depressed, unable to function emotionally, surviving at the end of her tether in a very different way. The blind man (Samuel Brewer), on the other hand is tougher, he is the one who seems to be challenging her as he tries to shake her up and prove to her that she is also made of blood, guts and deep emotions and that our senses are all important.
In English, he is the one who comes across as sharp and firm in his position to reject any attempt at humiliation, so the perspectives of the text are similar in intention and yet surprisingly different in how the emotions are conveyed according to the language spoken.
This is an interesting production that stirs many emotions and begs many questions.
The Eyes of the Night is presented in Spanish and English versions at the Cervantes Theatre till the end of the month of September 2019.
Playwright Paloma Pedrero / Translator Catherine Boyle
Director Simone Coxall
Set Designer Mariachiara Maracci
Lighting Designer Nigel A. Lewis
Production Manager Marvus Roche
State Manager Ángela Cano
Cast: Leyre Berrocal, Josema Gómez, Lanna Joffren and Samuel Brewer.
