Father, Away She Goes is a bold, caustic new tragicomedy by Electra Kolb that asks how far you would go to achieve your dream. Narcissist, compulsive liar, art school hopeful and social exile, Sarah Jones is a magnetic and deeply unsettling anti-heroine navigating ambition, identity and survival at any cost. This is a fearless interrogation of female ambition and the cultural discomfort surrounding it. Why are ambitious women still labelled ‘too much’, while men are celebrated as leaders? A Youngish Perspective holds this exclusive dialogue with Electra.
• What first compelled you to centre a protagonist who is so deliberately unlikeable, and what does that unlock theatrically?
A deliberately unlikeable protagonist tends to guarantee a strong reaction, but what interested me was how much nuance that reaction could hold. Sarah isn’t purely abrasive; she’s marmite, yet the audience becomes increasingly sympathetic as they learn what she carries. We live in a hyper‑reactive world where social media pushes us toward polarised responses, and I wanted to place a character onstage who resists that simplicity.
In Father, Away She Goes, the protagonist is deeply flawed, which feels refreshing because we’re all flawed. Her behaviour invites the question: is she shaped by her experiences, or are her antisocial tendencies simply adjacent to them? Theatrically, that ambiguity creates depth. By amplifying Sarah’s worst traits, the final twist forces the audience to reassess their judgement and confront how quickly we tend to categorise people. I think the extreme reaction audience’s have towards Sarah reveals a lot about society and how we function. And honestly, she makes me laugh… she says the most outrageous things others wouldn’t dare to!
• How has the play evolved since you first wrote and performed it at 17, particularly in its portrayal of ambition and consequence?
The play has expanded from a tight 40‑minute piece into a full 60‑minute theatrical exploration, allowing a deeper dive into Sarah’s ruthlessness, her comedy, and the relationships that have shaped her. But the play’s evolution is also deeply personal, as my own ambition has grown too! Going from a tiny 20-seat venue for a 6-day run as a 17-year-old with no team (just my mum and my sister helping me flyer), I was overwhelmed by last year’s incredible audience response. It was a massive vote of confidence and pushed me to return this year with a bigger venue and a small team consisting of a creative director and lighting designer!
• In shaping Sarah as a modern Lady Macbeth, how did you navigate the line between agency and the pressures imposed by the systems around her?
Sarah sits in that blurred space where agency and pressure bleed into each other, and I never wanted to draw a clean line between the two. For me, the tension in a modern Lady Macbeth figure comes from refusing to decide whether she is shaped by her experiences or driven by her own hunger, and here is where the audience’s own judgements come into play. In Lady Macbeth’s world, external systems and personal ambition were more clearly delineated. Today, those structures feel eroded, or at least disguised, which makes them more insidious. I wanted to explore how these forces still mould us, especially within contemporary womanhood, even when they appear to have faded.
By keeping that boundary unstable, Sarah becomes a character who embodies both complicity and constraint. The result is a portrait whereby ambition feels both self‑generated and system‑engineered, and the audience can choose upon which side they sit.
• What conversations do you hope the piece sparks around the way female ambition is judged differently to male ambition?
Female ambition is still treated as something that needs to be sanitised, and I want the piece to spark conversations about why that is. Ambition has often been a dirty word for women in a way that it simply isn’t for men; women are taught to shrink, to be pliable, to succeed only if their rise feels altruistic rather than self‑driven. Sarah Jones’s ambition is extraordinary, but the play refuses
to celebrate the mechanisms she uses. Instead, it presents them plainly, using the same matter‑of‑fact approach often granted to male characters. By watching Sarah manipulate the system, I hope the audience ask themselves whether it’s acceptable for her to leverage her position within our society. And if not, why? And what does that reveal about how we judge female ambition compared with male ambition?
• How do you balance the caustic humour with the darker psychological descent at the heart of the story?
Comedy is the most deliciously disarming tool I have for exploring conflict and emotional descent. That contrast gives the play another layer, both in the writing and in the performance. Sarah doesn’t use humour with care and that is precisely why she’s so jarring. Her jokes are caustic, insensitive, outrageous, and yet, they pull you in. She says the things that people censor in themselves.
As a performer, the play drags me into the very darkest corners of Sarah’s mind, so leaning into the comedy becomes a kind of oxygen. It lets the audience breathe too. There’s something so powerful about seeing them cry and then laugh just seconds later. Here, the audience becomes part of her world.
When the Scotsman newspaper compared Father, Away She Goes to both Succession and Fleabag, not only was it deeply flattering, but it also perfectly encapsulated the play’s balance between comedy and trauma, proving how irresistibly seductive foulness can be.
• What does the title Father, Away She Goes reveal—or conceal—about Sarah’s relationship to authority, identity, and escape?
The title plays a double game. On the surface, the Father/Further wordplay hints at the complexity of Sarah’s family dynamic and the darker edges of her psyche. The title holds its roots in Freud’s Electra Complex, gesturing towards a charged father–daughter relationship, which has shaped her understanding of authority and identity. “Away She Goes” speaks to Sarah Jones’ immutable pursuit of her ambition as the story tracks her psychological drift, pulling her further from stability, from herself, and from the version of success she is chasing.
Pleasance Dome (Queen Dome) from Wednesday 5th – Sunday 30th August (not 17th, 24th) at 17:15.
https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/father-away-she-goes