A Dead Body in Taos

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Rather than intelligently and emotionally exploring the ethics or indeed the psychological effects of all this, Farr instead chooses to spend too much time in flashback to Kath’s beginnings. 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. Gemma Lawrence plays Sam, whose muted, sensible personality contrasts with her mother’s mercurial temperament.

In Charlie Josephine’s Cowbois, a group of women is left alone in a small town while their husbands are away.

Rachel Bagshaw ( The Shape of the Pain ) directs the world premiere, in a co-production by Arcola Theatre and Fuel. Eve Ponsonby’s Kath seamlessly flits from her ardent past to the robotic present, and Clara Onyemere’s portrayal of Tristana Cortez – the humanely pragmatic supervisor at the Future Life Corporation – is one of the highlights of the evening. Is keeping an avatar version of your loved ones long after they have passed a comfort, or is it simply delaying the inevitable – is it more than anything, a barrier to the grieving process? It aims to promote interest in the theatre and foster dialogue, understanding and appreciation for different artistic productions around the world. Still, Lawrence does good work as Sam, especially as we get hints of a thawing in her feelings and a suggestion that maybe she does feel a loss.

I. of our future could offer a less engaged experience in which to reflect upon ourselves, connect with our loved ones and live on virtually. A rather unconvincing sub-plot features the excellent Jason Ives-Moiba as Sam’s lawyer who has suffered a conventional bereavement and who feel his dead wife comes to him. David Farr’s unusual and inquiring play, directed by Rachel Bagshaw and produced by Fuel, becomes an existential mystery exploring what constitutes humanness and how we can be truly free. I am impressed by the rapid switches she is able to make when we jump from the laboratory to the episodes in her life that define the robot she has become.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.