A Dead Body in Taos

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North West End UK was formed in 2015 with an aim to promote both amateur and professional theatre on an equal footing. Gemma Lawrence is a very watchable presence, particularly when she begins to thaw and engage with her mother’s posthumous identity.

The concept is great, as is the creative team, and the cast is strong, but it feels incomplete; a work in progress. It is surprising how much the play glosses over Kath’s accumulation of wealth, which is what leaves her able to afford this AI program. He has a particular interest in plays with an Irish or New Zealand theme/connection - one of these is easier to find in London than the other!A young woman is screaming, howling, and contorting her body with rage as an unfazed group of hippies looks on. Artificial Intelligence has been taken to its technological, moral and unsettling extreme and we are invited to question the nature of death and human consciousness. 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.

The scenes are acted against a backdrop of full-stage projections – crowds, paintings, news footage – which add little apart from visual clutter.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. Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today. Ti Green’s set is both mystical and technological: a huge wooden frame, like a doorway to another world, is outlined fluorescently; a pale background with shifting lines evokes the canvases of Agnes Martin, who built a cabin in Taos and who died there; she appears, still and meditative, as an inspirational force.

Post-divorce and sure of what the perfect relationship should look like, her world is upended by the arrival of a new love, and she has to grapple with her own expectations of her life as well as the expectations of those around her. Sam (Gemma Lawrence) grapples with the impact of the death of her mother Kath (Eve Ponsonby), but discovers that she now lives on as an artificial intelligence (AI).

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. Hats off to Designer Ti Green, Lighting Designer Katy Morison and the Composition and Sound Design team of Ben and Max Ringham. In Charlie Josephine’s Cowbois, a group of women is left alone in a small town while their husbands are away.

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). 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.Kath has chosen an image of her younger self from 1986, the year that she gave birth to her daughter, with which Future Life have created a 3D model of her that lives within a starkly illuminated frame.