A Dead Body in Taos

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Notably strong on the technical front but with a story that needs a little more work to be excellent. 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. The major complication comes when Kath’s will is explained: Sam gets nothing, it all goes to the sinister Future Life Corporation. When Sam goes to investigate she finds the ultimate in glossy American lifestyle salesmanship offering ‘to take humanity into the third millennium.’ Future Life offers nothing less than an end to death. Her mother Kath is only literally dead, she is virtually alive.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. The best argument against digital enhancement is the ability of human beings to generate their own change. It is an argument an actor makes every time she steps on stage.

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. She is Kath Horvath. On her body the police find a message for her daughter, to whom she has not spoken for many years. The message reads, 'Sam. Do not grieve. I am not here'. 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. 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. Kath Horvath is found dead in the New Mexico desert. With her body is a message for her estranged daughter Sam:

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.

This feeds into a bigger objection. “What I feel about British culture is that we’re basically very comfortable in upper-class nostalgia slash romanticism, and we have an interesting sentimental attachment to the working-class underdog, but we’re uncomfortable in that middle space where the French, for example, have no problem. There’s also something about our empiricism which means that we don’t see the idea of our world – we just see ourselves living our life.” Unfortunately, he says, he has hurt his hand – badly enough to stop him strumming the guitars, although it does not impede his longtime routine of spending every morning writing. He has several film scripts in the works, and has just completed the second in a series of children’s books inspired by stories told to him by the great-aunt and great-uncle in the photograph, who escaped with his grandmother from Germany in 1938. 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.

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).

Project History

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 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? 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.