West Park Playhouse | 6–8 November 2025
In 2095, a fictional discovery changes everything. Reciprocal Antenatal Blindness Syndrome—RABS—means that men experience temporary blindness during pregnancy.
What begins as a biological phenomenon becomes a social reckoning. Suddenly, the government invests in what it previously denied – free healthcare, in-home support, subsidised childcare, robust parental leave.
Family Welfare Centres become hubs of genuine care and community support. The population begins to grow.
But why did equality take so long to arrive?
And why did it require men to suffer before the structures of support materialised?
These are the questions at the heart of The Blindness, an original play that uses speculative fiction to examine the chasm between how society treats pregnancy depending on who experiences it.
The play unfolds across five interconnected vignettes, each exploring different facets of a world suddenly transformed by enforced bodily change. It examines bodily autonomy, patriarchal power structures, feminism and class. It asks what happens when the privileged are forced to confront the physical realities that others have endured for generations—and whether society’s investment in support systems would ever have occurred without that crisis.
The cast—Gillian English, Lucas Hodge and Caroline Cherry—perform these stories, grounding philosophical inquiry in intimate human moments.
This is not abstract debate but lived experience made theatrical, a reminder that questions of bodily autonomy, reproductive rights and social justice remain urgently present.
When:
- Thursday, 6 November at 19:30
- Friday, 7 November at 19:30
- Saturday, 8 November 14:00 pm & 19:30
Where: West Park Playhouse 20 Bass Highway Parklands
Tickets: https://theblindnessplay.eventbrite.com
About the Production
The Blindness is an original Griffin Original Productions play written and directed by North West Tasmanian Rebecca Griffin. It is a work of speculative theatre that uses near-future worldbuilding to interrogate present-day inequalities—a reminder that the personal is always political and that true equality requires more than legislation – it requires genuine empathy and structural change. This is theatre for our moment.
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