WELCOME TO PEMFORT

Soho Theatre

★★★

“its lovable characters and the show’s strong cast ensure a compelling watch”

Welcome to Pemfort, or more specifically, welcome to its gift shop – you’re the first customer this week! This heartfelt play will make you feel like maybe you should quit your job and work in a castle (ehm, fort), or maybe that was just me. Run by mother hen Uma (Debra Gillett), a bubbly former drug addict, set designer Alys Whitehead and Victoria Maytom bring the shop to life with their vintage carpets and quirky cabinets filled with homemade jam and wooden swords.

We get to know Uma and her ‘chickens’, laidback groundskeeper Ria (Lydia Larson) and Ali Hadji-Heshmati’s wonderfully serious, budding conservationist Glenn, as they debate how to present the site’s history at their fundraising Living History event. Glenn insists on historical accuracy and sensitivity while Uma prefers cherry picking all the gruesome bits to cook up one sensational historical soup. Their lighthearted quarrels make director Ed Madden’s show feel much like a meandering sitcom, reinforced by Max Pappenheim’s overtly cheesy music and Cheng Keng’s frequent blackouts. But the story gains momentum when Kurtis (played with conviction by Sean Delaney) enters the scene. An ex-convict guilty of an undisclosed crime, the Londoner is not as out of place in this wholesome team as he initially appears. As it turns out, Uma, Glenn, and even Pemfort itself also harbour a dark past that they deal with in very different ways.

Ultimately, this show poses the question of how we should deal with our bloody, tragic, shocking pasts and connects these to both individuals and the heritage industry. Can people really change, and how important is the past to the present? Writer Sarah Power draws these connections subtly and is never overbearing in her interpretation, nor does she necessarily link them to the much-debated topic of how to deal with the legacies of colonialism. The Living History event at the end of the play, featuring an entertaining swordfight carefully choreographed by Enric Ortuño and a gorgeous backdrop by Ellie Foreman-Peck, offers comic relief rather than formulating answers.

The play’s rather slow start leaves little time to uncover the character’s ‘secrets’ gradually. At just 95 minutes, the layers are peeled back through sometimes unprompted confessions, such as when Glenn suddenly starts sharing his childhood trauma with Kurtis, whom he openly dislikes. We hear about the ex-convict’s shocking crime as he practices how he’ll confess it to his crush Ria. Gossip and speculation sadly remain remarkably absent in Power’s script, meaning she does not raise the stakes as high as they could be. Still, the relationships between the characters feel genuine and complex, and their interactions frequently left the audience in stitches.

Despite issues in the script’s pacing, its lovable characters and the show’s strong cast ensure a compelling watch. Blending lighthearted workplace quarrels with themes of violence and reckoning, Welcome to Pemfort offers an evening that is equal parts entertaining and thought provoking.

WELCOME TO PEMFORT

Soho Theatre

Reviewed on 18th March 2026

by Lola Stakenburg

Photography by Camilla Greenwell

WELCOME TO PEMFORT

★★★

“a solid sketch show full of silly stuff”

Imagine a machine that puts your dreams on display in the middle of Soho for a hundred or so greedy audience members to peruse and cackle at over a pint. Sounds like a nightmare? Well Siblings Comedy are pitching it as a night out at the theatre!

A colander adorned with coloured fairy lights sits on a stool in the centre of the stage in front of a rack full of lab coats. We’re about to become participants in a clinical trial, with some attendees ominously asked to sign NDAs as they take their seats. The colander is actually a dream reading machine, which the awkward and bumbling scientist Gargle (Marina Bye) has been developing for years. He’s interrupted repeatedly in his introduction by the chaotic sound (Charlie Beveridge) and lighting (Lily Woodford-Lewis) sequence advertising his invention with the gravitas usually reserved for movie trailers. Gargle is supported in his mission by an aggressively chipper intern (Maddy Bye), a hapless long-term work experiencer whose main responsibilities are to bring Gargle back from distracted rants about his personal life and stop him requesting that someone on the front row get him a Five Guys.

Together, this dynamic duo run the clinical trial, sending the helmet to various audience members to reveal what’s inside their sleepy subconscious. Old favourites like not knowing your lines feature alongside whackier examples like a monarch deciding whether to behead or bed her jesters. Many audience members get to have their dreams ‘read’, but are mostly not asked to actively participate. The two lucky attendees who are invited on stage are given a deserved and hearty round of applause for managing to dance with the cumbersome and ill-behaved helmet on.

A rat turned tech freelancer gets a few opportunities to jump in verbally, but it’s just the two writers and performers of Siblings Comedy (real life sisters!) holding fort on stage under Dan Wye’s direction. Their rapport and comic timing as character actors is proven to be fine-tuned as they jump from sketch to sketch, bringing particular absurd hilarity to a pair of squabbling religious healers from the Deep South. Laughs are built up from Gargle’s consistent mispronunciations and the pair’s use of stupidity to argue with stupidity, and the song-writing is impressive in its pacey stacking of jokes. But for a show with the infinite world of dreaming at its fingertips – and a promise of the surreal – it erred on the side of predictable. You could see the cruder punchlines from a mile off, particularly the ones about unexpected appearances from Grandma. ‘Corpsing’ was relied on a little too soon and too frequently, so that in a few instances it felt like we were waiting for them to stop laughing, rather than the other way around.

It’s a solid sketch show full of silly stuff, and navigated confidently by the cast, but for a show about subconscious illusions there’s something truly bizarre missing.

Tag Archives: Soho Theatre

WELCOME TO PEMFORT

★★★

Soho Theatre

WELCOME TO PEMFORT

Soho Theatre

★★★

“its lovable characters and the show’s strong cast ensure a compelling watch”