The Blind Covering the Window (2021)
The Blind Covering the Window was a one-man piece of theatre created for Midnight at Home, a version of the student showcase Midnight at the Boilerhouse designed to allow people to keep creating theatre during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Blind Covering the Window was a piece I created for Midnight at Home 2.0 about mental health during lockdown. The piece was designed to examine the impact of isolating on a person’s mental health. The piece explored the slow descent that can befall a mentally health person, and what might begin as repetitious activity can become an exercise is crushing monotony. Existing in a small bubble day-after-day takes its toll. The Blind Covering the Window encourages people who are struggling with their mental health to speak to those they are close to, and shows the wondrous impact speaking out can have.
The Title:
The Blind Covering the Window was named for the blind in the room that was closed midway through the piece. As the blind is closed, even though the piece is set during the day, for the most part, the scene becomes noticeably dull and everything loses its shine. The blind itself is the outside world, the character shutting it off and officially isolating themselves, only opening it again at the end of the piece when they have reached out to their friends.
The blind is closed at such a time that the viewer should become used to the lighting in the piece so that when the blind is reopened at the end they do not realise exactly how much light was being blocked out. This is meant to represent how it feels when you are living with mental health difficulties. You can become accustomed to the state of things, and eventually you don’t realise the low quality of life until you are out the other side and realise what a low state you were once in.
Inspiration:
The piece was inspired by the idea of the bottle-neck episode - featuring few cast and often set in one location - such as Doctor Who’s ‘Midnight’ or Miranda’s ‘Just Act Normal’. The low budget (Midnight at Home featured no available budget), small cast, and limited locations of bottle-neck episodes perfectly mimicked the conditions of lockdown and isolating in the pandemic.
Challenges of the piece:
Creating work solo during lockdown presented its own challenges. Some of these were opportunities, such as the ability to show isolation on screen. It did however, mean that I was also responsible for recording and editing all scenes by myself. I am - ultimately - extremely proud of the work that was created and I feel that it is a successful venture into one-man creations.
Another challenge was the run-time. Pieces in Midnight at Home were restricted to a maximum of 8 minutes, and creating the piece to fit to this time frame was difficult. I had to make constant and effective use of montage to make this happen. Several moments in the piece are cuts lasting less than a second, showing snippets of a day to imply a constant stream of the same activities each morning or night. The smallest changes between scenes - such as a new plate on the floor or a slightly adjusted towel was extremely effective in showing the passage of time and character’s decaying mental health in isolation.