Set against the backdrop of modern America, A Dead Body in Taos is part mystery, part sci-fi epic and part love story, that leaves the audience wondering whether, in the 21st Century, freedom is something we should run to or escape from. Her only accompaniment is the cellist Gemma Rosefield, the composer and performer whose music heightens the most dramatic moments of the evening. Initially I thought that this would be a story about Sam and her anger at her selfish mother, who placed her into a boarding school in London and left for the States whilst having ‘some sort of breakdown’. She started life in the theatre as an actress and is currently writing her next book 'Libertine London.

Daughter Sam’s initial shock at her mother’s apparent suicide grows exponentially when a tech company claims to have created a digital version of Kath, with her last wishes being to live on as a kind of metaverse avatar. 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. 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. He has arrived back to childhood home after many year’s estrangement to prepare his recently deceased father’s body for its journey to afterlife. 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.From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer. The clean and simple set allows the text to speak for itself with multimedia projections and musical score enhancing the audience connection with the social and cultural experiences, lived throughout the story’s timeline and underlining the “scientific” aspects of the play. Sam hasn't spoken to her mother Kath for three years when she learns that she's been found dead in the New Mexico desert. 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.

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.Sam hasn’t spoken to her mother Kath for three years when she learns that she’s been found dead in the New Mexico desert. Kath, having been a user in life, does not let a little thing like death get in the way of her being a bad mother. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

is a philosophical riddle wrapped inside a story about grief, filtered through a futuristic fantasy. But Farr’s script is expertly plotted and paced, and Rachel Bagshaw’s staging is brilliantly lucid, delivering the kind of seamlessly tech-heavy production that producer Fuel excels at. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. A Dead Body in Taos is very American; jokes fly around about New Jersey, Iowa and the West Coast, characters declare their religion as if audiences should immediately understand it reveals something new about that character.Rachel Halliburton has been a theatre critic for 20 years, writing for publications including the Evening Standard, the Independent and the Arts Desk.