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A Dead Body in Taos

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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.

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. 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.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. A Dead Body In Taos is a challenging work that gives us plenty to ponder. The broad historical panorama drawn by Farr would perhaps be better served by a more expansive art form like TV. Those unaware of the Kent State shootings - arguably akin in epochal terms to the poll tax riots here, South Africa's Sharpeville massacre or the Tiananmen Square protests in China - will not appreciate the social and political impact that Farr references, an impact which may yet be felt by Vladimir Putin's Russia after his draft for the war in Ukraine. 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. He ponders these questions at a desk that he shares with a framed letter from Harold Pinter, congratulating him for his 50th-anniversary revival of The Birthday Party in 2008, and a fuzzy childhood photograph of his Jewish forebears. He’s endearingly proud of both. Two guitars stand by a wall in the wood-panelled flat, high above the rumbling traffic of one of north London’s busier quarters, where he lives with his partner. 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 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. Questions on what constitutes the human essence remain unanswered, and it is better this way. 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. 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? Farr’s drama, in part inspired by Adam Curtis’s documentaries, is ingeniously multifocused, though not fully energised as intellectual inquiry or emotional investigation. Rachel Bagshaw’s staging – for Fuel, the non-fossilised, ever-burning-bright production company – is exemplary. I love telling stories, sometimes through directing.” David Farr. Photograph: Manuel Vazquez/The GuardianIt 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. 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 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 young woman is screaming, howling, and contorting her body with rage as an unfazed group of hippies looks on. In a Californian commune, Kath is learning how to let go of her anger at the world's injustices, and instead focus on her own spiritual journey. It's a pivotal scene in much-respected director David Farr’s exhilarating play, one that pinpoints how a whole generation of boomers matured from ’70s radical protesters to wealth-hoarding individualists.

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