Review: Welcome to Pemfort (Soho Theatre)

Review by Sam Woodward

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

When you walk into the Main House at Soho Theatre, the first thing that catches your eye is the set: a small castle gift shop, slightly gloomy but full of lovingly observed detail. Wonderfully realistic and wistfully nostalgic, it evokes the kind of place many will recognise from childhood trips and rain-soaked afternoons spent wandering around historic sites. At first, Welcome to Pemfort seems to promise a comic look at the mechanics of heritage performance, as four colleagues prepare for the castle’s first Living History event. But beneath that familiar setting, something darker is waiting to surface.

Written by Sarah Power, whose previous play Grud was produced at Hampstead Theatre and nominated for an Off West End Award for Best New Play, Welcome to Pemfort confirms her as a writer with a distinctive voice. Her script is rich in sharply observed detail and social comedy, but what is most striking is the patience of the writing. Rather than forcing its bigger themes to the surface too quickly, Power lets them emerge through character, awkward conversation and the slow destabilising of an apparently ordinary workplace. The result is an impressive and moving play that treats difficult questions with seriousness, nuance and empathy.

Power’s writing is matched by a stellar cast, each performer feeling exactly right for the world of Pemfort. Debra Gillett is wonderfully assured as Uma, a loving, fleece-wearing maternal presence whose warmth and familiarity make her feel instantly recognisable. She brings a lovely comic ease to the role, while also hinting at the more difficult history beneath Uma’s kindness. Ali Hadji Heshmati is equally strong as Glenn, capturing his awkwardness, exactness and particular way of moving through the world with remarkable control. It is a performance full of specific physical and vocal choices, and Hadji Heshmati makes Glenn both very funny and deeply touching. Together, they anchor the play’s portrait of everyday castle life with real warmth and texture.

The arrival of Kurtis shifts the play into more fragile territory, and Sean Delaney’s performance is extraordinary. Shy, hunched, yet quietly engaging, he initially seems to bring a new softness to the group, especially through his immediate connection with Ria. As they work together on the festival timeline, their rapport is funny, awkward and unexpectedly tender, giving the play a sense of possibility that feels all the more precarious as events unfold. The turning point comes in the play’s most devastating scene, when Kurtis reads a letter to Uma about his conviction for aggravated rape twelve years earlier, in the hope of eventually sharing that truth with Ria too. It is an extraordinarily painful moment, and one that Power handles with immense seriousness and care. Delaney is crucial to its force. His performance never asks for easy sympathy, but presents Kurtis as flawed, haunted and deeply self-aware, a man fully conscious of the horror of his past and the damage it continues to do.

Ed Madden’s direction is impressively assured, especially in the way it guides the audience from the comic rhythms of castle life into a much more serious moral landscape. Nothing much changes outwardly: Alys Whitehead’s gorgeously detailed gift shop remains as it was, the jam jars still on the shelves, the same cramped world of everyday heritage life still in view. And yet, by the end, it feels entirely altered. The achievement lies in how far the play travels emotionally without needing to announce that journey through any major visual shift.

What makes Welcome to Pemfort so gripping is that it refuses to let this revelation settle into anything simple. Glenn, with his instinct for order and certainty, sees Kurtis differently at once, his response shaped by a moral clarity that leaves little room for ambiguity. Ria, by contrast, is thrown into a far more uncertain and painful space, forced to reckon with the gulf between the man she has come to know and the truth he has disclosed. It is here that Sarah Power’s idea of whether someone can “live as changed” becomes most potent. The play does not offer an easy answer, and that is precisely its strength. Instead, it asks a profoundly difficult question of its characters and its audience alike: how should we treat a person who has done something unforgivable, but who seems to understand that fact completely and to have spent years trying to become someone better?

By the time the Living History event finally begins, Welcome to Pemfort has started to fold past and present into each other with real assurance. A recurring story about a woman who died in the bell tower is threaded through the play in a way that keeps subtly shifting the frame, so that questions raised by one act of violence begin to haunt another. At times, you find yourself wondering which story the play is really asking you to think about, and that uncertainty becomes part of its power. What first seems like local castle folklore gradually takes on a much darker relevance, making the final stretch of the play feel both playful and morally complex.

Welcome to Pemfort begins in a world that feels familiar, funny and faintly ridiculous, then gradually reveals itself to be asking something much harder of its characters and its audience. What is so impressive is that it never loses its humour or humanity along the way. Beautifully written, superbly acted and directed with real assurance, it is an unexpectedly devastating piece of theatre.

Welcome to Pemfort plays at Soho Theatre until 18 April. Tickets from https://sohotheatre.com/events/welcome-to-pemfort/#performances 

Photos by Camilla Greenwell