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.

There are some brilliant ideas here, and powerful themes: bereavement, AI, student protest, vacuous advertising, corporate encroachment and mother- daughter conflict, but in the end the play never fully hangs together. It never really comes to life, it is always less than the sum of its parts It argued something really scary,” he says, “That the social rebellion and experimentation of the 1960s, which were meant to be fighting against the patriarchal, corporate and governmental control of the 1950s, particularly in America, but also here in the UK, suddenly shifted from a collective movement into this very strangely individual thing of self-enlightenment and sexual freedom. And ironically, that generation created the most selfish, individualistic age that there has ever been, which is the age that I was brought up in.” A Dead Body in Taos is David Farr’s latest play. 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. Sam has been travelling to the small town to identify the body of Kath (Sam calls her by her first name because she never liked the term ‘mother’) and execute her will. Upon meeting with her lawyer, Sam discovers that her mother had become associated with one of America’s many enterprises that promise a life after death. 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 Farr’s new play is a brave experimental piece of sci-fi in theatre, one not usually attempted. 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. At this stage the plot of the daughter’s emotional wrangles is overtaken by that of the mother running through her past life, though the sparing use of 1960s and ‘70s music evokes the time perfectly. 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? 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'. 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.

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. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? That’s not to say that Taos is a bad play, just that it is too diffuse in parts. The main plot centres on Sam (Gemma Lawrence), who, having not spoken to her mother Kath (Eve Ponsonby) in three years, discovers that she’s been found dead in New Mexico. However, it turns out that the she has left her substantial fortune to a company that has designed an AI replica of herself, so that she can reconcile with Sam.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.

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. Journeying to the small town of Taos, Sam discovers her mother has become embroiled in an unsettling deal with FutureLife, a multinational biotech corporation promising digital immortality. The two men summon scenes from the postwar left: Paul Robeson, Aldermaston marches, women called Muriel, admirable Quakers Farr throws up moral and ethical conundrums aplenty. Is it fair to spend your only child's inheritance on extending your own life? Should children be the arbiters of their parents' happiness? And who ultimately should decide who lives and who dies? 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 body has been found in the desert outside Taos, New Mexico. It is identified, cremated and the ashes scattered. But is the person who inhabited it really dead? 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. 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. I love telling stories, sometimes through directing.” David Farr. Photograph: Manuel Vazquez/The Guardian