Some actors play double versions of their characters, including Ponsonby (physical and intense) as well as David Burnett as her university lover, Leo. The cast are compelling across the board, including Lawrence, who emanates grief complicated by resentment at all the ways her mother failed her. Flawed love is an underlying theme: Kath is drawn to the cult-like foundation promising eternal digital life in hope of being given a second chance at parental (as well as romantic) love, which bears a resemblance to Caryl Churchill’s A Number. It could be confusing. 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. Designer Ti Green fills the stage with an ingenious assemblage of screens that sit surprisingly naturally amid the crumbling splendour of Wilton's Music Hall. They display subtitles (in a welcome move towards inclusivity) as well as projections that shift the scene from desert to stark facility.

Notably strong on the technical front but with a story that needs a little more work to be excellent. 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.” 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”. Kath Horvath is found dead in the New Mexico desert. With her body is a message for her estranged daughter Sam: 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.”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. 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. A lot of this just doesn’t work. Even the captioned text is in American English and so there are misspellings. A little tailoring for a non-American audience might have gone a long way here. Crucially, Eve Ponsonby gives a compelling central performance as insufficient mother and avatar; all in white, pale faced, hair unleashed; part Isadora Duncan, part Florence of the machine. Her digital incarnation is the last of many reinventions: she is seen as discontented daughter, innovative painter, Esalen follower and student activist – present at Kent State University in the 70s when students protesting against the escalation of the Vietnam war were shot by national guardsmen. The best argument against digital enhancement is the ability of human beings to generate their own change. It is an argument an actor makes every time she steps on stage. It argued something really scary,” he says, “That the social rebellion and experimentation of the 1960s, which were meant to be fighting against the patriarchal, corporate and governmental control of the 1950s, particularly in America, but also here in the UK, suddenly shifted from a collective movement into this very strangely individual thing of self-enlightenment and sexual freedom. And ironically, that generation created the most selfish, individualistic age that there has ever been, which is the age that I was brought up in.” 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?

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. Now Sam has an unimaginable chance to rebuild their broken relationship. But first, she must decide whether she can finish what Kath has started. Ultimately, A Dead Body in Taos doesn’t fully hold together. The concept is great, as is the creative team, and the cast is strong, but it feels incomplete; a work in progress. This would be absolutely excellent with a little more focus and tightening of the story, but for now, it is merely good. Farr’s drama, in part inspired by Adam Curtis’s documentaries, is ingeniously multifocused, though not fully energised as intellectual inquiry or emotional investigation. Rachel Bagshaw’s staging – for Fuel, the non-fossilised, ever-burning-bright production company – is exemplary. A woman’s corpse is found in the New Mexico desert. Her estranged daughter comes from England to identify the body and is confronted not, as she half-anticipates, by a murder, but by a startlingly continuing existence. Her mother, Kath, had become involved with a biotech corporation that garnered individuals’ memories and archival photographs to create cyborgs. She has left all her money (bitcoin, presumably) to the institute and taken advantage of the facilities to become a digital version of herself. Will robomum and her daughter be able at last to bond?

Compelling’: Eve Ponsonby (left), with Gemma Lawrence and Clara Onyemere, in A Dead Body in Taos. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian 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.

David Farr’s new play is a brave experimental piece of sci-fi in theatre, one not usually attempted. However, the play begins to feel disjointed at the point when Sam tries to come to terms with the enormity of having a dead, but living mother with whom she still has emotional issues, and we cut to a series of sketches of Kath’s journey of self-development as we watch her past life revealed – her involvement in student protest, free love, encounter groups, the punk scene, and the advertising industry. At this stage the plot of the daughter’s emotional wrangles is overtaken by that of the mother running through her past life, though the sparing use of 1960s and ‘70s music evokes the time perfectly.A Dead Body In Taos is a challenging work that gives us plenty to ponder. The broad historical panorama drawn by Farr would perhaps be better served by a more expansive art form like TV. Those unaware of the Kent State shootings - arguably akin in epochal terms to the poll tax riots here, South Africa's Sharpeville massacre or the Tiananmen Square protests in China - will not appreciate the social and political impact that Farr references, an impact which may yet be felt by Vladimir Putin's Russia after his draft for the war in Ukraine. Perhaps, through the kind of revolutionary technology shown in this play, Farr feels that a new epoch for humanity is on its way.