A cultural awakening arrived through theater: The Lehman Trilogy helped me live with sight loss.
I started noticing my vision dimming in my forties, but not in the ordinary aging way. Night blindness and blind spots crept into my field of view. At 44, I was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic eye condition that gradually kills retinal cells. I’d always identified as a visually oriented person—an practicing architect who loved reading, drawing, going to the cinema, and visiting art exhibitions. So when black text vanished from bright white pages, when films grew unreadable, and when artworks only took shape after someone explained them, I began to question who I would be without my sight.
Around age 50, a year of intense stress hit me hard: divorce, the end of my business, a new job, a move, and the death of my father. As my life felt like it was tumbling off a cliff, my eyesight plunged further, and by 2015 my visual field had narrowed to about 5–10 degrees (a normal person’s field is roughly 200 degrees). I was registered as legally blind, yet I spent a long time in denial, not sharing how little I could see. At work I projected an air of full sightedness, a daily performance that exhausted me and kept me in survival mode, hoping I wouldn’t be exposed. I resisted identifying as disabled and refused to use a white cane, but once I did, people began to see my disability before they saw me. I felt my sense of self unravel. I also stepped back from the cultural activities that had once brought me joy.
Three years after that dreadful period, I walked into a theater for the first time since losing much of my sight. The Lehman Trilogy, staged at the National Theatre in London, appeared to be just another story about the Lehman Brothers and the 2008 financial crash. I anticipated another ordeal of piecing together fragments and missing pieces, a familiar struggle I faced with cinema or TV. Yet from the darkness of the stalls, as the curtain rose and three actors appeared, it felt almost as if my vision had returned.
Es Devlin’s stark, high-contrast set design, the precise lighting, the trio of performers, the actors’ silhouettes, and the minimalist props created a kind of magic. For the first time in years I could actively follow what was happening. The rotating, cage-like set is central: by concentrating all action within this frame, I no longer had to decide where to look or worry about missing moments in the narrative. The pared-down staging revealed the words, the movement, and the story with remarkable clarity.
I felt utterly immersed, with no barriers—liberating in a way I hadn’t realized I needed. The experience was so visceral that I didn’t even recognize its impact at the time. I simply felt like I had become myself again. Since that first viewing, I’ve seen The Lehman Trilogy three times, and each performance has allowed me to forget I’m partially sighted. For three hours and twenty minutes, I am fully present as my former self.
That initial theater experience was a breakthrough: live performance offered a immediacy and control I couldn’t find in other visual media. Not every production achieves this kind of alchemy, but since then, almost every time I attend a play, I feel deeply connected to the world the performers create. I’ve regained more than a sense of sight—I’ve reclaimed a sense of self.
