The two men summon scenes from the postwar left: Paul Robeson, Aldermaston marches, women called Muriel, admirable Quakers This feeds into a bigger objection. “What I feel about British culture is that we’re basically very comfortable in upper-class nostalgia slash romanticism, and we have an interesting sentimental attachment to the working-class underdog, but we’re uncomfortable in that middle space where the French, for example, have no problem. There’s also something about our empiricism which means that we don’t see the idea of our world – we just see ourselves living our life.” Then he parachuted off a career cliff. “I decided about 10 years ago that I wouldn’t have a plan of any kind because I suddenly realised that I just don’t really fit in,” he says. “I don’t have just one thing that I want to do. If someone asked me to sum myself up in a single word, I’d say I’m a storyteller, because they don’t do anything. I’m not a painter or a photographer, but I love telling stories, sometimes through directing.” One of his college contemporaries was the actor Rachel Weisz – “a highly confident, very clever, albeit quite complicated north London girl, from a very intellectual Jewish family”. Together they started making “these extraordinarily weird plays, which we’re still very proud of, actually”. They set up a theatre company, Talking Tongues, and won a Guardian student drama award at the Edinburgh fringe. Farr emerged from university with a double first and was given his first professional directing job by Stephen Daldry at the Gate theatre in London. At 32, he became artistic director at Bristol Old Vic, followed by four years running the Lyric Hammersmith and a stint as an associate director at the RSC. 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.

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. Eve Ponsonby gives a stand out-performance as Kath who is needy, belligerent and sometimes screaming as a live woman, but icily sardonic as a cyborg. This is the story of someone who has always been self-willed. As an artist she needs to follow her own vision, but sometimes she is merely selfish – as in her infidelity because ‘the opportunity was gaping’, and in her refusal to do the work she is being paid for because she doesn’t feel like it. Facing the end of her life, she doesn’t want to die, why should she if she can afford not to?

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. A young woman is screaming, howling, and contorting her body with rage as an unfazed group of hippies looks on. In a Californian commune, Kath is learning how to let go of her anger at the world's injustices, and instead focus on her own spiritual journey. It's a pivotal scene in much-respected director David Farr’s exhilarating play, one that pinpoints how a whole generation of boomers matured from ’70s radical protesters to wealth-hoarding individualists. 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?

Notably strong on the technical front but with a story that needs a little more work to be excellent. 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”. 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.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. 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. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.