A Dead Body in Taos

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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. Eve Ponsonby brilliantly brings ‘Cyborg Kath’ to life with an eerie accuracy in her flat and robotic voice. But this quiet rumination is shattered by a series of flashbacks, which become the meat of the play, presented as memories related by the machine consciousness. Ti Green’s set design gives the drama a spatial layering that brings clarity to the story’s past-present structure: a frame for the virtual reality sections, and distinct platforms for the various phases in Kath’s life, along with deft scene changes using video, designed by Sarah Readman, and sound, by Ben and Max Ringham.

Full of ideas and ideals, we follow her story through an area dominated by the Vietnam War and the various movements against it. Travelling to the small town of Taos to identify the body, she discovers Kath had become embroiled in a shadowy enterprise, offering Sam an unimaginable chance to rebuild their broken relationship. When Sam goes to investigate she finds the ultimate in glossy American lifestyle salesmanship offering ‘to take humanity into the third millennium. While we can see from the flashbacks that Kath may not be the nicest person, it is a bit of a jump to the complete lack of a relationship with her daughter as she dies. It dwells on the edges of possibilities, almost leaving the spectator to fill in the blanks while they are left to make sense of what this story is actually about.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. The major complication comes when Kath’s will is explained: Sam gets nothing, it all goes to the sinister Future Life Corporation. 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.

But before we have much of a chance, we are whisked back to Kath’s student days where there is much talk about the 1968 protests, Vietnam, Cambodia and changing the world. In one of the smallest theatres in London, a play whose main characters do not budge from their chairs slowly unfurls.

From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer. Through a series of flashbacks, we discover more about the rebellious free-spirited Kath and her life before and after marriage to Sam’s father, including a truly heart wrenching Sliding Doors moment. The stage design ( Ti Green) is deceptively simple, initially offering some small wooden steps and an oversized door frame. It’s well acted throughout, especially Gemma Lawrence as Sam but the wider scope proves too ambitious and I struggled to care about the various figures in Young Kath’s life, who all seem designed purely to push various aspects of the play’s agenda. David Farr’s incisive and reflective writing appeals to the clash between human vitality and materiality and the developing AI industry as well as touching on human impressionability.

What follows mixes flashbacks into Kath’s hippie quest for self-knowledge with Sam’s tortuous present-day journey to understand her robo-mum. Such a theme is not unfamiliar to general audiences, as theatre, literature and film have tampered with it in a quite a few occasions, producing from acclaimed masterworks like Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi novel The Positronic Man -previously, The Bicentennial Man-) to nightmarish catastrophes such as Spielberg’s infamous A.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Sam (Gemma Lawrence) confirms it is her mother, Kath (Eve Ponsonby), only to discover that Kath still exists – or one version of her – as a cyborg in whom her mother imprinted a lifetime’s memories before her own death. 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). Sam’s funeral pilgrimage, intended to bury past trauma, becomes a fraught philosophical conundrum, opening old wounds and perhaps offering a chance for redemption.

A Dead Body in Taos barely discusses the ethics of life through AI, nor thoroughly interrogates the relationship between mother and daughter. A Dead Body in Taos is co-commissioned by Fuel, Theatre Royal Plymouth and Warwick Arts Centre with support from Bristol Old Vic; A Dead Body in Taos is funded by Arts Council England and produced by Fuel. Eve Ponsonby gives a fearless but abrasive performance as Kath that is high energy but low sensitivity – it is easy to see why Sam doesn’t hold much in the way of feelings for her.She handles the news surprisingly well, but grief turns into anguish as she receives a letter from her mother’s pocket: Do not grieve me, I am not here.