"Once a body is in a bog. I suppose it becomes a bog body, doesn't it?"

Finn isn’t entirely sure how he ended up here. Last night, he was driving through the middle of nowhere to meet a stranger who had something very important to tell him, when his car suddenly… well, something weird happened. He was probably overtired.

When he wakes up in a house deep in isolated marshland, inhabited by a young woman called Martha, her peculiar father Peter, and their even more peculiar housekeeper Abigail, something isn’t right. Martha is always talking to someone out on the marsh; Peter seems to know more about Finn than he should; Abigail keeps telling him to be careful. It’s clear that the car crash was no accident – but who brought him here, and why?

Fathom is a feminist, folk-horror retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest set against the landscape of the Fens. This is a murky, mischievous, and darkly funny new play that plumbs the depths of rural England – and those who call it their home.

Fathom first appeared as a work-in-progress preview at the Cambridge Junction in April 2026, where audiences described it as “moody and funny”, and “rooted in folklore but entirely original”. Suffolk-based creative Gina Stock returns to direct a full production of this East Anglian thriller. Fathom is written by Imogen Usherwood, the 2025-26 Peter Shaffer Playwright-in-Residence at Trinity College, Cambridge.