It isdirected by Kitty Ball (who also designed the sound) and Jess Gough providesassistant direction. 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. 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 story fascinatingly explores the reasons AI is feared while not getting too much into science fiction. Some actors play double versions of their characters, including Ponsonby (physical and intense) as well as David Burnett as her university lover, Leo.

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! 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. Unfortunately, the emotional core, the chasm in the mother/daughter relationship, isn’t fully explored. A back-screen shows digital images of Kath’s younger self, combined with smears of colour and shapes (she was once an art student). We flashback through Kath’s life to learn more about her, and the action touches on the gap that exists between mother and daughter.Featuring comedy, ongoingly rapid pace, a luring plot and a slight pull from the heart’s strings, A Dead Body in Taos has more than a few ingredients to guarantee a nice night in the theatre and, even of further note, to boost some profound conversations after watching. David Farr, who adapted both The Night Manager and the Midwich Cuckoos for TV, is the pen behind this piece of near sci-fi which explores how artificial intelligence is shaping our lives and deaths. The best argument against digital enhancement is the ability of human beings to generate their own change. Ti Green’s set design gives the drama a spatial layering that brings clarity to the story’s past-present structure: a frame for the virtual reality sections, and distinct platforms for the various phases in Kath’s life, along with deft scene changes using video, designed by Sarah Readman, and sound, by Ben and Max Ringham. 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.

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. Faber Members get access to live and online author events and receive regular e-newsletters with book previews, promotional offers, articles and quizzes. For almost 60 years he has brought to his explorations of love between men, and his patient examination of non-grand lives, an unusual combination of qualities: sophistication and simplicity, stillness and passion, a disregard for dogged literalness and a meticulous documentary detail. Nevertheless, Sam would still be seeking some sort of closure, and conversations with the deceased are often consoling. The major complication comes when Kath’s will is explained: Sam gets nothing, it all goes to the sinister Future Life Corporation.David Farr’s incisive and reflective writing appeals to the clash between human vitality and materiality and the developing AI industry as well as touching on human impressionability. We learn about very different phases and stages in her life that lead to her spending her life’s savings to become an artificially intelligent robot and relive her life with those people she was unable to maintain relationships with. A Dead Body in Taos is an imaginative and compelling narrative portraying the full range of raw and visceral emotions experienced in our human existence and how the A. 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. 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.

I am a fan of the concept and the ideas tossed around, but I am not entirely convinced by the execution. 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.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. The theme of AI and disembodied consciousness is not new but Kath’s tenacity and the gradual discovery of the motivations behind her decision and her psychological progression as a living person are what make the play so fascinating.

If her daughter chooses to keep her mother ‘alive’, and not press the delete button, she would have to feed Kath’s emotional needs, presumably for the rest of her life. The motor of the memories is sexual longing, embodied here by James Schofield and Sam Thorpe-Spinks, who appear as the men’s young lovers: they don’t have much to do, but pull off a strangely of-the-period look – and, oh, how they gleam.

These are the themes that David Farr explores in his new play A Dead Body in Taos currently stopping at Wilton’s Music Hall as part of a UK tour. She is a frequent contributor to journals, magazines, and television documentaries on history, culture, sex, and feminism. Farr’s drama, in part inspired by Adam Curtis’s documentaries, is ingeniously multifocused, though not fully energised as intellectual inquiry or emotional investigation.