While your eyes never get used to the total darkness of Sound&Fury’s latest, the rest of you does. At first, it feels unusual; somewhere along the lines of a floatation tank. You’re aware of your physical edges, your body’s boundaries, and of the expanse of space around you. There’s also the odd sensation of genuine privacy in public, of being alone in a roomful of people.
These contrasting sensations – of self and beyond – could not be better synced with Going Dark’s entwined subjects: the universe and blindness. It shows Max, a lecturer at a Planetarium, losing his sight. While the universe expands, Max’s view of it shrinks; his peripheral vision gradually clenching into a pinhole camera’s perspective.
In dim light, we see Max both at work, enthusing over visible galaxies 2.5 million light years away, and at home, caring for his young son Leo. As his sight fades, both lives become harder, to the point of being jeopardised entirely.
Hattie Naylor’s script is blissfully empathetic, and benefits hugely from the combination of John MacKay’s tender performance and Sound&Fury’s stagecraft, both of which are equally stunning. MacKay is absolutely humane: dignified and vulnerable, determined and terrified. You like, respect and admire Max enormously, but he is, at all times, just another one of us. He can laugh about his diminishing sight, setting himself blindfold challenges that result in packed liquid lunches for Leo, but he also trembles at its approach.
Meanwhile, Sound&Fury gift us his experiences, surrounding our heads with confusing, sometimes overwhelming, cacophonies: street scenes and train announcements, or simply the darting voice of his son, pottering around with his talking Thunderbirds figurines. They save the best until last: a gorgeous deconstruction of the sounds of Max’s rain-pelted garden – the silver birch, the concrete path, the rosebush, the roof – that the mind reconfigures into a landscape around you.
Yet, as you grow accustomed to the sensations of darkness and low-light, the returns diminish. Naylor’s script does little more than place two ideas next to one another. No matter how neatly they are backed up by sensation, the 80 minutes start dragging as the food for thought runs out. Going Dark is more about feelings than it is ideas; a triumph of stagecraft over substance.
Nonetheless, its staged with such poetic aplomb that you never begrudge its slightness. Glimpsed moments are meltingly beautiful. Sound&Fury create a variety of locations, from dark rooms to kitchen stoves and bathroom sinks, from next to nothing, often through a certain type of light alone. As such, Max exists in a void, surrounded by blackness, and it becomes apparent – increasingly so as his vision fades – that, for all its enormity, the universe is no more than one’s own sphere of perception. From our individual windows on it, each of us is master of our own universe, no matter how adrift we might feel in it.
Photograph: Robert Hubert Smith
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