A Dead Body in Taos

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Recent productions include A Dead Body in Taos (Bristol Old Vic/ Wilton’s Music Hall), Augmented by Sophie Woolley (Royal Exchange/Told by an Idiot) and Philip Pullman’s Grimm Tales for Unicorn Theatre Online. Other work includes The Bee in Meand Aesop’s Fables(Unicorn Theatre), Midnight Movie(Royal Court Theatre). Her critically acclaimed work The Shape of Pain won a Fringe First at Edinburgh, was revived at Battersea Arts Centre in 2018. Other productions include Resonance at the Still Point of Change (Unlimited Festival, South Bank Centre), The Rhinestone Rollers and Just Me, Bell (Graeae). Film includes Let Loose(Unicorn Theatre Online/ENB) and Where I Go (When I Can’t be Where I Am (BBC/China Plate).

A 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. Busybodying about their relatives, they begin to be a bit busy about each other. Mostly, though, they encircle the two men with their own misunderstanding. For love has not died. One elderly hand reaches out for another. It is angrily wrenched away by the son: it is extraordinary how brutal this single gesture seems. Price’s character protests that this affection is simply friendship. A closing gesture – silent, not spelt out – shows what depths of feeling she has missed. Nothing stated, all implied: “something in the air”. A Dead Body in Taos tells Sam's story as she travels to New Mexico to bury her estranged mother. Gradually Sam uncovers her mother's traumatic past, her attempts to break away from her stifling American small-town upbringing, her protest days in the 60s, her experiments with alternative lifestyles and her lifelong, fruitless quest for freedom which eventually left her with nothing (and, as it turns out, everything) to live for. That’s not to say that Taos is a bad play, just that it is too diffuse in parts. The main plot centres on Sam (Gemma Lawrence), who, having not spoken to her mother Kath (Eve Ponsonby) in three years, discovers that she’s been found dead in New Mexico. However, it turns out that the she has left her substantial fortune to a company that has designed an AI replica of herself, so that she can reconcile with Sam. A woman’s corpse is found in the New Mexico desert. 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. Her mother, Kath, had become involved with a biotech corporation that garnered individuals’ memories and archival photographs to create cyborgs. She has left all her money (bitcoin, presumably) to the institute and taken advantage of the facilities to become a digital version of herself. Will robomum and her daughter be able at last to bond?Kath Horvath is found dead in the New Mexico desert. With her body is a message for her estranged daughter Sam: Notably strong on the technical front but with a story that needs a little more work to be excellent.

David Farr made his name in 2016 bringing John le Carré's book The Night Manager to vivid life in a hit TV adaptation. In his latest play A Dead Body In Taos, re-animation is again the name of the game. Some actors play double versions of their characters, including Ponsonby (physical and intense) as well as David Burnett as her university lover, Leo. The cast are compelling across the board, including Lawrence, who emanates grief complicated by resentment at all the ways her mother failed her. Flawed love is an underlying theme: Kath is drawn to the cult-like foundation promising eternal digital life in hope of being given a second chance at parental (as well as romantic) love, which bears a resemblance to Caryl Churchill’s A Number. Sam is introduced to the ethereal figure of Kath in a white gown, speaking mechanically but with wit and awareness. She is a cyborg, a product of 3D modelling and years of Kath recording facts about herself at the Future Life labs. As Sam is told, ‘your mother had therapy all her life, many kinds, so she was highly skilled at emotional and biographical recall.’ It’s good to know there is a use for all that therapy after all.

Project History

A Dead Body in Taos barely discusses the ethics of life through AI, nor thoroughly interrogates the relationship between mother and daughter. Instead it spends considerably more time on 1970s Vietnam and the activism that the younger Kath had as a driving force in her life. We briefly meet Leo ( David Burnett) during the funeral and are shown his meeting with her and the importance he would play in the remaining decades of her life. 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.

Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? Then he parachuted off a career cliff. “I decided about 10 years ago that I wouldn’t have a plan of any kind because I suddenly realised that I just don’t really fit in,” he says. “I don’t have just one thing that I want to do. If someone asked me to sum myself up in a single word, I’d say I’m a storyteller, because they don’t do anything. I’m not a painter or a photographer, but I love telling stories, sometimes through directing.” For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. A Dead Body in Taos is very American; jokes fly around about New Jersey, Iowa and the West Coast, characters declare their religion as if audiences should immediately understand it reveals something new about that character. A lot of this just doesn’t work. Even the captioned text is in American English and so there are misspellings. A little tailoring for a non-American audience might have gone a long way here. It could be confusing. But Farr’s script is expertly plotted and paced, and Rachel Bagshaw’s staging is brilliantly lucid, delivering the kind of seamlessly tech-heavy production that producer Fuel excels at. Designer Ti Green fills the stage with an ingenious assemblage of screens that sit surprisingly naturally amid the crumbling splendour of Wilton's Music Hall. They display subtitles (in a welcome move towards inclusivity) as well as projections that shift the scene from desert to stark facility.One of his college contemporaries was the actor Rachel Weisz – “a highly confident, very clever, albeit quite complicated north London girl, from a very intellectual Jewish family”. Together they started making “these extraordinarily weird plays, which we’re still very proud of, actually”. They set up a theatre company, Talking Tongues, and won a Guardian student drama award at the Edinburgh fringe. Farr emerged from university with a double first and was given his first professional directing job by Stephen Daldry at the Gate theatre in London. At 32, he became artistic director at Bristol Old Vic, followed by four years running the Lyric Hammersmith and a stint as an associate director at the RSC. Rachel is an award-winning stage director and recipient of the National Theatre Peter Hall Bursary for 2023/24. It has just been announced that she will be the next Artistic Director of Unicorn Theatre, after being Associate Director since 2018. Compelling’: Eve Ponsonby (left), with Gemma Lawrence and Clara Onyemere, in A Dead Body in Taos. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian It argued something really scary,” he says, “That the social rebellion and experimentation of the 1960s, which were meant to be fighting against the patriarchal, corporate and governmental control of the 1950s, particularly in America, but also here in the UK, suddenly shifted from a collective movement into this very strangely individual thing of self-enlightenment and sexual freedom. And ironically, that generation created the most selfish, individualistic age that there has ever been, which is the age that I was brought up in.” 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. This is the story of someone who has always been self-willed. As an artist she needs to follow her own vision, but sometimes she is merely selfish – as in her infidelity because ‘the opportunity was gaping’, and in her refusal to do the work she is being paid for because she doesn’t feel like it. Facing the end of her life, she doesn’t want to die, why should she if she can afford not to?

A Dead Body in Taos is David Farr’s latest play. Based in the long-time artist colony Taos, it tells the story of two estranged women who seem to love each other but cannot climb over their own barriers. Sam has been travelling to the small town to identify the body of Kath (Sam calls her by her first name because she never liked the term ‘mother’) and execute her will. Upon meeting with her lawyer, Sam discovers that her mother had become associated with one of America’s many enterprises that promise a life after death. Discovering that Kath recently changed her will to fund her own programme at the Future Life Corporation, Sam is given the opportunity to rebuild the broken relationship with her mother.

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Journeying to the small town of Taos, Sam discovers her mother has become embroiled in an unsettling deal with FutureLife, a multinational biotech corporation promising digital immortality. It is surprising how much the play glosses over Kath’s accumulation of wealth, which is what leaves her able to afford this AI program. Presumably it is from a successful career in advertising but it seems like a fairly significant and particularly relevant point to leave unclarified, especially as it is such a contrast to everything else we learn about her.