Jēkabs is an ordinary boy in extraordinary circumstances: both of his parents are blind.  As the only person who sees in the family, he serves as his mother’s and father’s eyes, whereas it’s the parents who have to raise their son and leave him a chance to have a childhood. The play, taking place in the small town of Cēsis in 1990s Latvia, is Jēkabs’s growing up story. “The Boy Who Saw in the Dark” gives the viewer a chance to become aware of the life of people who are often overlooked by the sighted, and raises the question of a blindness in the spiritual level.

Marta Aliide Jakovski: “Sometimes it seems that our society cannot or doesn’t want to see some of its problems or some of its members. One of the groups left in the peripheral view of the society are the physically blind. “The Boy Who Saw in the Dark” tells us a story of a family in these circumstances. Working with this material, meeting with people, and delving into the daily lives of visually impaired people – I was in for an unpleasant surprise. I realised just how little our society has changed since the Soviet times. Of course, nowadays there are so many better ways to get by as a blind person. But what’s surprising is how little we, the average people without such disabilities, include blind people in society. During the Soviet times, visually impaired people were a closed-off community in an already closed society. Now that we live in an open society, are we doing enough not to close visually impaired people off into their own world? There should be no place for societal blindness in 21st-century Estonia.”