A living history that refuses to stay past its sell-by date
Hook
What happens when a castle’s past is commodified and then unsettled by a past that won’t stay pressed in the museum of memory? Welcome to Pemfort, where a gift shop stocked with plastic goblets and dragon slippers sits cheek-by-jowl with a living-history event that refuses to be merely quaint or instructive. This isn’t nostalgia theater dressed up as heritage; it’s a reckoning with the stories we tell about ourselves and what we’re willing to do when the past starts speaking back.
Introduction
Powerful, intimate, and morally thorny, Sarah Power’s new play (as staged at Soho Theatre) dives into the tension between historical re-enactment and the unglamorous, sometimes violent human truths those histories contain. The piece lingers on the edge of sentimentality, then tears away the wrapping paper to reveal a harsher question: can we curate history without excusing the harm that shapes it? My take is that this production isn’t just a critique of how we stage the past; it’s a mirror held up to our present impulse to turn memory into entertainment while claiming to respect truth.
A cast of oddballs with tenderness at their center
- The sleepy castle’s event planning becomes a laboratory for moral reflection. Glenn, meticulously accurate, embodies a longing for control and authenticity that borders on obsession. He wants the event to be a reliable, historically faithful demonstration, not a sanitized show. What makes this particularly fascinating is how his rigidity exposes a universal itch: the desire to domesticate danger in order to feel safe.
- Uma, warm and scattershot, challenges the project’s boundaries by proposing a quick-and-dirty fusion of past trauma with present spectacle. Her suggestion—lumping disparate, dark stories into a single, digestible narrative—speaks to a common impulse in modern culture: to fuse the sensational with the educational, hoping that intensity equals insight. This raises a deeper question: when we fuse empathy with sensationalism, are we amplifying truth or diluting it?
- Ria, more buoyant and present, anchors the piece in relationship and human connection. Her half-commitment to the deer she’s befriending signals a softer mode of engagement—one that asks us to see the past through the eyes of people trying to live in it without becoming consumed by it.
Kurtis arrives and fractures the narrative
Kurtis, played with a fearsome, splintered humanity by Sean Delaney, embodies the past that refuses to stay past. His willingness to reveal a violent history—without offering easy redemption—forces the ensemble to confront what history costs in the present. The onstage tension isn’t simply about forgiveness or punishment; it’s about the difficulty of integrating a damaged past into a life that moves forward. In my opinion, Delaney’s performance captures the claustrophobic dread of accountability—the moment when someone you’re learning to root for might remind you that human beings aren’t reducible to a single act or a single memory.
Silence as a dramatic device
Director Ed Madden leans into the gaps between lines, letting silences accumulate like dust in an old cabinet. These pauses aren’t filler; they are ethical space where the audience negotiates their stance. The script’s refusals to offer neat answers turn the theater into a shared ethical workout: we watch, we weigh, we decide—and we’re asked to live with the discomfort that comes with ambiguity. What this approach makes clear is that history, properly staged, invites conversation more than consensus.
The re-enactment as paradox
The play’s meta-layer—the looming re-enactment of past violence that could become entertainment—hits a troubling nerve. It’s a reminder that time’s passage can anesthetize memory, turning tragedy into routine. If you take a step back and think about it, the paradox is obvious: the same impulse that preserves stories also risks hollowing them out. What Power forces us to examine is whether the theater of history can teach without trivializing, and whether audiences can resist the ease of catharsis in favor of accountability.
Deeper analysis
Pemfort operates at the intersection of cultural memory, ethics, and audience responsibility. The production provocatively argues that living history is not a neutral conduit for education but an ongoing negotiation over meaning. What many people don’t realize is that the act of staging history is itself a political act: it chooses which voices are foregrounded, which horrors are allowed to linger, and where the line between pedagogy and spectacle is drawn.
From my perspective, the play’s most compelling move is its insistence that the past does not end with the last curtain. It continues to demand recognition in our choices—what we celebrate, how we punish, and what we retell to whom. The characters’ frictions illuminate a broader trend: a culture increasingly aware that memory requires ethics, not just nostalgia. The question isn’t whether we should remember; it’s how we remember in a world where histories are curated, packaged, and sold.
Conclusion
Pemfort challenges us to confront a stubborn truth: history is not a neat archive but a living pressure on our present. The play’s final note lingers not as absolution but as an invitation to more careful listening, more courageous questions, and a willingness to stay uncomfortable long enough to learn. If we’re serious about truth, we must resist turning the past into a product and instead use it as a tool for accountability—both to those who suffered and to the future we’re building.
What this piece ultimately asks is simple but urgent: what kind of memory do we want to inhabit—and what are we prepared to do to keep it honest?
