For the first 15 minutes or so, I thought I had Welcome to Pemfort’s number. Sarah Power’s play presents as a cosily familiar comedy about a clutch of small-town eccentrics pulling together in an effort to stage a fundraising fun day for the titular medieval fort (not a castle!) that forms the chief point of interest in their sleepy town.
And Power has crafted a classic trio of oddballs: dotty older lady boss Uma (Debra Gillett), autistic nerd Glenn (Ali Hadji-Heshmati) and hippyish Ria (Lydia Larson), who believes she’s made friends with a deer. The three of them run Pemfort in relative harmony.
But it’s the hire of Sean Delaney’s ex-con Kurtis that starts the real story, the quirky villager tropes used as cover to ask some very hard questions about community and forgiveness. Curtis is a good-hearted, sensitive person who has done the work, wants to be better and wholeheartedly regrets the terrible crime he committed as a young man (exactly what it was we only discover around the halfway point). But his arrival is, nonetheless, a seismic event for the small community.
Really, Power’s play is a meditation on human nature and the ability to forgive, magnified through the lens of smalltown life, where every addition to the community is scrutinised and dwelt upon. Clearly Kurtis deserves to be given a second chance. But is it realistic to think he’ll get one? Should he have simply lied about his past?
These are hard, painful questions that Power asks unsparingly while also, crucially, keeping up the quirky smalltown vibes. She mines some hidden depths out all the characters, especially Glenn, whose Ayoade-ish facade conceals a real fury. But the constant background quirkiness helps the tough meditations on human nature go down smoother – you’d better believe there’s a delightfully lo-fi battle reenactment scene at the climax.
It gets heavy-handed at one point, when Glenn makes a speech about the impossibility of separating a building from its history that does feel quite a lot like it’s Power addressing us rather than Glenn talking about Kurtis. But for the most part Ed Madden”s production is nuanced and sensitive. If you’re not invested in the tentative relationship between Ria and Kurtis you don’t have a pulse. And it’s a fine range of bittersweet performances: everyone gets to do funny, everyone gets to do sad. And there’s a lovely gift shop set from Alys Whitehead that yields up a delightful transition in the final scene.
On the surface Welcome to Pemfort is a naturalistic drama about quirky rural folks. And it’s a good example of that! But scratch that surface and it’s got a core of steel - an unflinching look at the human condition that’s only cosplaying as cute.
