For the fourth instalment in its “Season of Manchester Drama”, Altrincham Garrick Studio opts for the unexpected. Alongside the more familiar Hobson’s Choice and A Taste of Honey, it is Alistair McDowell’s Pomona — a dense, disorientating work from 2014 — that proves the boldest programming choice. In Mark Goggins’ assured and imaginatively realised production, it becomes something close to unmissable.
The programme’s content warning is exhaustive — violence, abuse, sexual assault, human trafficking, suicide — and suggests an evening of grim endurance. Yet what unfolds is something more intellectually disquieting than viscerally shocking: a slippery, elusive blend of dystopian satire, urban noir and cosmic horror that owes as much to Black Mirror as it does to H. P. Lovecraft. The shocks here are not cheap or sudden, but cumulative, creeping in through suggestion, ambiguity and the slow erosion of certainty.
McDowell’s fractured narrative resists linearity, circling its subject rather than confronting it head-on. Ollie (Natalie Leaper), searching for her missing sister, finds herself in a car with the fast-talking, faintly unhinged Zeppo (Peter Brassington), looping endlessly around the M60. Their conversations veer wildly — from theories of property ownership to an oddly impassioned breakdown of Raiders of the Lost Ark — before settling on Pomona Island, a derelict, half-mythical space at the centre of Manchester described as a “hole in the city”, a place people enter but do not leave.
From this premise, the play constructs a shifting and often destabilising reality. Scenes repeat, refract and subtly alter. Characters return in different configurations, their motivations and histories increasingly uncertain. A figure of Cthulhu, silently solving a Rubik’s Cube in the back seat of Zeppo’s car, becomes an emblem of the play’s recursive logic — at once absurd, playful and faintly menacing. What may or may not be a role-playing game, devised by two isolated twenty-somethings — Keaton (Rachel Jacquest) and Charlie (Jay Wise-Martin) — threatens to collapse the boundary between fiction and lived experience altogether.
It is a structure that demands considerable precision from both performers and director, and Goggins meets that challenge with confidence. His handling of tone is particularly assured: moments of deadpan humour sit comfortably alongside passages of genuine dread, while the production resists the temptation to impose a single, definitive interpretation. Instead, it trusts the audience to assemble meaning from fragments, to sit with uncertainty, and to draw their own — often conflicting — conclusions.
The cast of seven rise impressively to the play’s demands. Brassington’s Zeppo is a standout: voluble, funny and quietly unsettling, he delivers the opening monologue with a compelling blend of charm and menace that sets the tone for what follows. Leaper gives Ollie a grounded emotional core, her search for her sister providing a thread of human urgency through the play’s more abstract passages. Aimee Olivia Brown’s Gale shifts from apparent control to abject terror with striking clarity, while Jacquest executes a late pivot that reframes both her character and the narrative itself in chilling fashion.
Emma Holtom’s Fay and Leaper’s Ollie together lend weight to the play’s underlying critique of a world that persistently exploits and devalues women. There is little comfort to be found here: the misogyny embedded in the play’s universe is systemic and inescapable. Meanwhile, Mason Gee and Wise-Martin chart a trajectory from disaffection to violence that feels both shocking and disturbingly plausible, their performances capturing the aimlessness and suppressed anger of lives drifting without direction.
Visually and spatially, the production is notably restrained. The studio setting is used with economy and intelligence: sparse props, careful lighting and a fluid approach to staging allow locations to shift with minimal fuss. This simplicity proves a strength. By withholding explicit detail, Goggins encourages the audience’s imagination to fill in the gaps — a recognisably Hitchcockian technique that heightens tension and personalises the experience of fear. What is unseen, or only partially glimpsed, becomes all the more potent.
Sound plays a crucial role in sustaining atmosphere. Goggins’ original score underpins the action with a low, resonant unease, its presence subtle but insistent. It does not dictate emotional response so much as deepen it, reinforcing the sense of a world slightly out of joint, where familiar structures have begun to warp.
If Pomona ultimately resists resolution, that is entirely the point. This is a play that lingers in the mind, its meanings shifting retrospectively as moments are reconsidered and connections drawn. Post-show conversations are likely to be as fragmented and inconclusive as the narrative itself — and all the more engaging for it.
That Altrincham Garrick has chosen to stage such a challenging and unconventional work is notable in itself. That it does so with such clarity, confidence and imaginative flair is genuinely impressive. A sell-out opening night, coupled with a noticeably younger audience than is typical for the venue, suggests the gamble has paid off.
An unsettling, intellectually rich and unexpectedly beautiful production — and one that lingers long after the final moment.
Reviewer: Paul Wilcox
Reviewed: 24th March 2026
North West End UK Rating: