Theatre review: Welcome to Pemfort

Sarah Power's Welcome to Pemfort had kind of gone under my radar - as anything buried somewhere in the clutter of Soho Theatre's schedule is apt to do - until its cast was announced, and offered the chance to see Sean Delaney back on stage for the first time since the Oh My God They Killed Kenny incident. Whatever my motivations I'm glad to have caught it, as the strong cast is matched by an impressive play that balances light and dark to offer something genuinely thought-provoking and heartbreaking. Pemfort is a small Mediaeval castle (despite the name nobody can quite confirm if it's technically a fort) on the outskirts of a village of the same name, and for all that the locals consider a Civil War battle on its grounds to be a major historical event, the world at large doesn't agree and the site barely gets any visitors, even during the summer season.

Despite this a small team led by Uma (Debra Gillett) looks after the grounds and runs the gift shop, and after meeting ex-con Kurtis (Delaney) at Narcotics Anonymous she offers the young man a job as the fort prepares for a fundraising Living History event.

He joins the pedantic Glenn (Ali Hadji-Heshmati,) whose neurodivergent side finds a lot to fascinate him in the building's rich and often bloody history, as well as in his very precise idea of how that history should be told; and Ria (Lydia Larson,) who feels like she wasted her twenties chasing after a man and now finds a purpose communing with nature in the castle's grounds. But Uma and Kurtis have been vague about exactly what the newcomer did to land in prison, and as he and Ria start to get closer he has to be honest with her.

Power's play doesn't put a foot wrong, and Ed Madden's production - on Alys Whitehead's detailed set of a gift shop you'd genuinely want to root around in - is so absorbingly charming and funny it leaves you fully exposed for the darker elements to really hit home. So Uma's scatty brand of nurturing, Glenn's fussiness, Ria's sweetness and Kurtis' vulnerability all contribute to a lot of laugh-out-loud scenes that don't entirely go away even when the truth about Kurtis threatens to put these new relationships at risk. There's also a real sense of beauty in the writing - a running subplot sees Ria describing trying to help a deer with wire caught in its antlers, and afterward Jan said it was told so vividly he felt as if he'd watched it play out in front of him.

The setting in a location full of stories from history is a very clever one for Power's theme of when, exactly, past crimes and horrors lose their emotional rawness and whether forgiveness is ever possible - after all most of the events that are being recreated for the Living History day as reenacted swordfights and ghost tours are worse even than what Kurtis did, but the passing of centuries gives them a touch of camp along with the distance. Power is pretty unambiguous about Kurtis' rehabilitation and genuine regret, which is refreshing enough in itself when the storytelling cliché here would be to have him relapse.

She still comes up with a brutal twist of the knife though, leaving us both sympathetic to Kurtis' right not to have his past define him, and to Ria not deserving the weight of the decision she has to make. There's an almost fairytale quality of friendliness and warmth to Pemfort, which makes the stark darkness of the story told there even more devastating.

Welcome to Pemfort by Sarah Power is booking until the 18th of April at Soho Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Camilla Greenwell.