A Dead Body in Taos

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You might think (at least if you have never heard of Samuel Beckett) that Something in the Air would have limited scope. The issue of whether the cyborg Kath is showing signs of humanity cannot be dismissed outright; it becomes another of this play’s intriguing mysteries. Eve Ponsonby gives a stand out-performance as Kath who is needy, belligerent and sometimes screaming as a live woman, but icily sardonic as a cyborg.

Dominic Thorburn also has different roles all of which are played excellently, as some of the male influences in Kath’s life. Travelling to the small town of Taos to identify the body, she discovers Kath has become embroiled in a shadowy enterprise, offering Sam an unimaginable chance to rebuild their broken relationship. Jade Anouka’s debut play, Heart, currently playing at Brixton House, is the autobiographical story of her discovery of her bisexuality in her twenties. What follows mixes flashbacks into Kath’s hippie quest for self-knowledge with Sam’s tortuous present-day journey to understand her robo-mum. It’s well acted throughout, especially Gemma Lawrence as Sam but the wider scope proves too ambitious and I struggled to care about the various figures in Young Kath’s life, who all seem designed purely to push various aspects of the play’s agenda.The opening scenes are wonderfully staged, with a ghostly apparition stalking almost imperceptibly slowly behind the action, eventually assuming her space on the “screen” which she claims is her new home after death. Crucially, Eve Ponsonby gives a compelling central performance as insufficient mother and avatar; all in white, pale faced, hair unleashed; part Isadora Duncan, part Florence of the machine.

Set against the backdrop of modern America, A Dead Body in Taos is part mystery, part sci-fi epic and part love story, that leaves the audience wondering whether, in the 21st Century, freedom is something we should run to or escape from. From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer. Sam, played by Gemma Lawrence, has flown in from London to identify the body of her mother, Kath, from whom she has been estranged for three years. View image in fullscreen ‘Compelling’: Eve Ponsonby (left), with Gemma Lawrence and Clara Onyemere, in A Dead Body in Taos. This season, Wilton’s Music Hall melts away its nineteen-century ambience (only in narrative values) to offer us a journey to the not-too-distant future.In the pocket of Kath’s dead body is a note, addressed to her daughter, with the vague message “Don’t grieve. The body of a 70-year-old woman is found in the New Mexico desert near the town of Taos, a place of pilgrimage for those seeking to embrace alternative forms of living.