Sam has travelled from her home in the UK to identify the body of her 70 year-old Mother in the New Mexico town of Taos.

These are the first words that Sam (Gemma Lawrence) speaks to her mother Kath (Eve Ponsonby) in over three years. However, the play begins to feel disjointed at the point when Sam tries to come to terms with the enormity of having a dead, but living mother with whom she still has emotional issues, and we cut to a series of sketches of Kath’s journey of self-development as we watch her past life revealed – her involvement in student protest, free love, encounter groups, the punk scene, and the advertising industry. 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. The link to the present is a touch tenuous, but on the stage the two settings are constantly rubbing shoulders with each other in the revolving doors of a confusing narrative. Featuring comedy, ongoingly rapid pace, a luring plot and a slight pull from the heart’s strings, A Dead Body in Taos has more than a few ingredients to guarantee a nice night in the theatre and, even of further note, to boost some profound conversations after watching.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. David Farr’s latest play lands in London for a strictly limited run after touring across the UK from its inception at the Bristol Old Vic.

Guillermo Názara reviews this piece exploring human emptiness and crave through the eyes of the inert, to let us know his thoughts on this production taking place at one of the most alluring venues in London’s Off-West End. Rather than intelligently and emotionally exploring the ethics or indeed the psychological effects of all this, Farr instead chooses to spend too much time in flashback to Kath’s beginnings. 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. David Burnett plays Leo, Kath’s love interest, a polo-neck wearing freedom fighter inspired by Kath’s ferocity.Directing his own work (here in collaboration with Alice Hamilton), he sets up dance-like patterns between actors and seems to choreograph silences. Farr’s story fascinatingly explores the reasons AI is feared while not getting too much into science fiction. 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’. 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? Notably strong on the technical front but with a story that needs a little more work to be excellent.

He has arrived back to childhood home after many year’s estrangement to prepare his recently deceased father’s body for its journey to afterlife. To suffer from too much ambition may be preferable to having too little, but I’d have loved to see a more stripped back version of A Dead Body in Taos that really luxuriated in the intellectual foreboding of those early scenes. I am equally drawn to Gemma Lawrence’s portrait of Sam and sympathise with all the emotions that come with discovering that your dead mother is not as dead as you thought. 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.The scenes are acted against a backdrop of full-stage projections – crowds, paintings, news footage – which add little apart from visual clutter. 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. 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. 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.