John Malkovich on Sweden visit with hypnotic, musical monologue
Updated 00.47 | Published 2026-06-23 23.59
“Report on the blind”, guest performance at the Royal Opera
On film do John Malkovich often supporting characters to hypnotic fixpoints with their sneakily low-intensity playing style. So when I read before his guest performance in Sweden that the musical monologue “Report on the blind”, with which he has toured since 2015, seems to have arisen from a scrapped plan to film the novel, I am not at all surprised.
To matching unpredictable music by the Russian polystylist Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998), here he performs texts from the Argentinian author Ernesto Sabatos (1911-2011) incredible “About heroes and graves”from 1961, focusing on the novel’s long-mysterious character Fernando. You have to get to its third part, which is precisely called “Report on blind people”. Peter Landelius Swedish translation, to understand that this hitherto recurring name is borne by the father of Alexandra, who in turn is the object of Martin’s complicated love.
Another captivating supporting character, then, is what John Malkovich portrays when he meets the audience as this Fernando Vidal Olmos on Royal Opera House in Stockholm (followed by a guest performance at Storan in Gothenburg) together with the Funäs Chamber Soloists and the Moscow-born pianist Anastasya Terenkova.
It all begins in Sábado’s magic-realist spirit with a fragile bell, like the blind street vendor’s signal in the Plaza Mayo in Buenos Aires, where Fernando begins his story one summer day in 1947. From here, his conspiratorial confessions clatter, click, ping and curl out of a blue-suited Malkovich in refined interaction with the fascinating and advanced music’s curves and stylistic blends. All the musicians sit up on stage with Malkovich, and the conductor Alexander Gordon leading them insinuatingly and evasively through Schnittke’s “Concerto for Piano and Strings” when Fernando rants about how the world is ruled by a sect of the blind, and just as dramatically swelling when he questions the existence of God and Malkovich fixes the audience with his gaze declaiming “BELIEVE IN ME!”
Throughout Sábato’s more than 500-page masterpiece questions are asked about truth versus lies, evil and good, but disconnected like this from the context of the novel and enhanced by Schnittke’s intense composition, these excerpts become an artistically heightened zoom in on a man obsessed with conspiracy theories. A timeless, concentrated image that speaks directly to our urgent contemporary times.
The contrast is palpable after the evening started off Johan Rabaeuswho, like a band, were given the somewhat thankless task of warming up the audience with Swedish seasonal lyrics signed Boye, Strindberg, Fröding and Trans currents to Antonio Vivaldi’s “The four seasons”. The chamber orchestra from Funäs performs together with the solo violinist Alyssa Margulis an interesting and flawless interpretation of the hard-wearing seasons, while Rabaeus unfortunately comes across as a little poorly prepared for the evening’s first performance of two at the Royal Opera. Not least in comparison to the incomparable Malkovich who invokes Sábato’s magical darkness in a considerably much higher class after the break.
THEATER
» Report on the blind
Lyrics by Ernesto Sábato
Music: Alfred Schnittke, Antonio Vivaldi
Conductor: Alexander Gordon
Cast: John Malkovich, Anastasya Terenkova & Funäs Chamber Soloists, Johan Rabaeus
Scene: A production by Friends of Chamber Music, guest performance at the Royal Opera in Stockholm June 23 and Stora Teatern in Gothenburg June 25
Playing time: 1 hour 45 minutes including a break
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