![]() ![]() I apply a little to a cotton pad and massage it into my face. It is an argument an actor makes every time she steps on stage.I typically like to use a Micellar water during my morning routines when I don’t need to a full on cleansing. The best argument against digital enhancement is the ability of human beings to generate their own change. Her digital incarnation is the last of many reinventions: she is seen as discontented daughter, innovative painter, Esalen follower and student activist – present at Kent State University in the 70s when students protesting against the escalation of the Vietnam war were shot by national guardsmen. Ti Green’s set is both mystical and technological: a huge wooden frame, like a doorway to another world, is outlined fluorescently a pale background with shifting lines evokes the canvases of Agnes Martin, who built a cabin in Taos and who died there she appears, still and meditative, as an inspirational force.Ĭrucially, 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. Here, they mark generational change – hippy softness and punk roars – and retune the mood of each scene, with quietly threatening drums and an electronic zing. 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. Rachel Bagshaw’s staging – for Fuel, the non-fossilised, ever-burning-bright production company – is exemplary. Will robomum and her daughter be able at last to bond?įarr’s drama, in part inspired by Adam Curtis’s documentaries, is ingeniously multifocused, though not fully energised as intellectual inquiry or emotional investigation. She has left all her money (bitcoin, presumably) to the institute and taken advantage of the facilities to become a digital version of herself. Her mother, Kath, had become involved with a biotech corporation that garnered individuals’ memories and archival photographs to create cyborgs. Her estranged daughter comes from England to identify the body and is confronted not, as she half-anticipates, by a murder, but by a startlingly continuing existence. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The GuardianĪ woman’s corpse is found in the New Mexico desert. ‘Compelling’: Eve Ponsonby (left), with Gemma Lawrence and Clara Onyemere, in A Dead Body in Taos. Actually, the notion of the unnerving in A Dead Body in Taos, a blend of disturbed family relations and spooky technological interventions, is fairly traditional – you might say, eternal. ![]() Nothing stated, all implied: “something in the air”.ĭavid Farr’s new play promises stranger, spookier fare than that offered by Gill. A closing gesture – silent, not spelt out – shows what depths of feeling she has missed. Price’s character protests that this affection is simply friendship. It is angrily wrenched away by the son: it is extraordinary how brutal this single gesture seems. One elderly hand reaches out for another. Mostly, though, they encircle the two men with their own misunderstanding. Busybodying about their relatives, they begin to be a bit busy about each other. The motor of the memories is sexual longing, embodied here by James Schofield and Sam Thorpe-Spinks, who appear as the men’s young lovers: they don’t have much to do, but pull off a strangely of-the-period look – and, oh, how they gleam.Ī niece, the radiantly matter-of-fact Claire Price, and a son, the terrifyingly down-to-earth Andrew Woodall, come to visit in what, it becomes evident, is a nursing home. They summon scenes from the postwar left – I thrilled to this, as it was a spot-on evocation of a world I knew through my parents: Paul Robeson, Aldermaston marches, women called Muriel, admirable Quakers, Kathleen Ferrier’s voice. They look back on lives both intertwined and separate, eloquent about encounters when homosexual love was deemed a criminal activity, frank about devotion and betrayal. The evening’s success is largely dependent on the marvellous ability of the actors who play them – Ian Gelder and Christopher Godwin – to be at once precise and elusive. Both look frail, as if they have been propped in their chairs for display. ![]() Two men in their late 70s sit side by side in chequered socks and patchwork quilt. The two men summon scenes from the postwar left: Paul Robeson, Aldermaston marches, women called Muriel, admirable Quakers ![]()
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