A Dead Body in Taos

Product Information

Burnett is particularly impressive when showing the ageing of his character from a college-goer to a man in his late 60s, with subtle but impressive shifts in body language and posture. Farr’s play gestures at the question without answering it, avoiding getting bogged down in unanswerable conundrums about the location of the soul, or more down-to-earth detail about how the androidification process actually works (it's seemingly based on lengthy chats that resemble therapy sessions).

They say that we only live once (though many of the ones who strongly support that idea also believe in the after life…), so why should we restrain ourselves from doing what we really want to instead of what others expect us to? I am a fan of the concept and the ideas tossed around, but I am not entirely convinced by the execution.A rather unconvincing sub-plot features the excellent Jason Ives-Moiba as Sam’s lawyer who has suffered a conventional bereavement and who feel his dead wife comes to him. I am impressed by the rapid switches she is able to make when we jump from the laboratory to the episodes in her life that define the robot she has become. Faber Members get access to live and online author events and receive regular e-newsletters with book previews, promotional offers, articles and quizzes.

The entire cast does a great job to support the story, given that there are rapid character switches at certain times. 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.

Sound designers Ben and Max Ringham have, over the last few years, become increasingly important to the stage, guiding audiences through stories with music and noises that are never simply effects, but extra layers of sensations. The plot focuses on Sam (an enthusiastic Gemma Lawrence) who finds herself in Taos, a small town in New Mexico. Gemma Lawrence plays Sam, whose muted, sensible personality contrasts with her mother’s mercurial temperament. Kath, having been a user in life, does not let a little thing like death get in the way of her being a bad mother.

Enough by Emily Hunter is presented by Moonstone Theatre, reviving after pickingup the Best Drama award at the Greater Manchester Fringe Awards in 2023. Sam’s funeral pilgrimage, intended to bury past trauma, becomes a fraught philosophical conundrum, opening old wounds and perhaps offering a chance for redemption. At this stage the plot of the daughter’s emotional wrangles is overtaken by that of the mother running through her past life, though the sparing use of 1960s and ‘70s music evokes the time perfectly.You might think (at least if you have never heard of Samuel Beckett) that Something in the Air would have limited scope. Initially I thought that this would be a story about Sam and her anger at her selfish mother, who placed her into a boarding school in London and left for the States whilst having ‘some sort of breakdown’.