It could be a beautiful exploration of grief and how our modern lives inhabit a digital world that leaves footprints behind forever. 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.

The character construction is therefore well executed, giving depth and relatability to them (either because we’ve been when they are, either because they might remind us of somebody we know) as well as some sort of evolution throughout the performance. It dwells on the edges of possibilities, almost leaving the spectator to fill in the blanks while they are left to make sense of what this story is actually about. Journeying to the small town of Taos, Sam discovers her mother has become embroiled in an unsettling deal with FutureLife, a multinational biotech corporation promising digital immortality. Photograph: Steve Gregson View image in fullscreen ‘At once precise and elusive’: Ian Gelder (left) and Christopher Godwin in Something in the Air.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 treatment of her lovers and an angry reaction to a bizarrely out of place scene at a meditation commune all just make us like Kath less and less. The body of a 70-year-old woman is found in the New Mexico desert near the town of Taos, a place of pilgrimage for those seeking to embrace alternative forms of living. Little does she know that she is in for a disturbing challenge as she boards a plane to New Mexico to sort her mother’s affairs. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. 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. 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. 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.

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. Ti Green’s set is minimalist, carried by a huge backdrop of screens that serve as a place to display subtitles as well as graphics to enrich the story. Guillermo Názara reviews this piece exploring human emptiness and crave through the eyes of the inert, to let us know his thoughts on this production taking place at one of the most alluring venues in London’s Off-West End. Directing his own work (here in collaboration with Alice Hamilton), he sets up dance-like patterns between actors and seems to choreograph silences. 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.