A Dead Body in Taos

Product Information

This allows for strikingly effective use of light ( Katy Morison) and projections throughout, leading to standout moments such as when Leo adds to Kath’s artwork and the video moves and changes to match his movements – even the splatter going off the canvas. The words projected on the stage subconsciously suggested a separation between bodies, language and meaning. But soon she discovers that Kath isn’t so dead after all: she’s put her entire life savings into preserving herself as a prototype android, created by shadowy biotech facility FutureLife. She’s not talking to a corpse, but a mechanical representation of her mother aged thirty-five, into which her mother’s memories, emotions and biographical data have been uploaded. How you respond to David Farr’s drama about a former Sixties radical who cheats death by turning herself into a cyborg depends, to a large extent, on whether you are a fan of Adam Curtis, the man responsible for those relentlessly quirky documentaries about society and its ills (cue archive film of SS men playing backgammon to the sound of Doris Day’s Que Sera, Sera).

Gemma Lawrence’s Sam makes sturdy work of a daughter that has not felt the love of a Mother for most of her life – but we don’t see her grapple with the emotional torment anywhere near enough. David Farr’s new play is a brave experimental piece of sci-fi in theatre, one not usually attempted. The plot focuses on Sam (an enthusiastic Gemma Lawrence) who finds herself in Taos, a small town in New Mexico. The freedom to which Sam is referring is obviously emotional rather than physical as there seems to have been little communication between mother and daughter up to this point.

The synthetic voice is particularly unnerving as well, all to a heightened effect in the acoustic Wilton’s Music Hall. Full of ideas and ideals, we follow her story through an area dominated by the Vietnam War and the various movements against it. With classics such as Ted Hughes's The Iron Man and award-winners including Emma Carroll's Letters from the Lighthouse, Faber Children's Books brings you the best in picture books, young reads and classics. Ti Green’s set is minimalist, carried by a huge backdrop of screens that serve as a place to display subtitles as well as graphics to enrich the story. 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).

You may regret many things in life or wish you had some of them in a different manner, but you won’t certainly repent from going to see this one. 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. Notably strong on the technical front but with a story that needs a little more work to be excellent.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. com shall not be deemed to endorse, recommend, approve and/or guarantee such events, or any facts, views, advice and/or information contained therein. 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. The treatment of her lovers and an angry reaction to a bizarrely out of place scene at a meditation commune all just make us like Kath less and less.