Review: ORCA, Southwark Playhouse, 4 November 2016

Fan is as excited as a girl can be. Just 14 years old, she is in line to be chosen as The Daughter, the key role in her village's long traditional of offering a ceremonial sacrifice to the whales that once, long ago, chased the fish out of the waters and left the people starving for a terrible winter. The orcas still come to the harbour in the summer, but The Daughter is not cast forever into the dark depths of the sea, but rescued by The Father, the village's patriarch, and brought safely back to shore, the orcas assuaged. If you're thinking that there's a bit of 70s cult classic, The Wicker Man, in that summary - you're not far wrong.

Fan's sister, Maggie, 18 now, has been ostracised by the villagers for her "lies" about what happened to her as The Daughter two years earlier and, when she sees a distressed Gretchen, The Daughter of last year, she vows to save Fan from her fate. But her father is, like everyone else in the village, in thrall to The Father, and the family, like the village itself, is fracturing over Maggie's determination to be heard.

Matt Grinter won the 2016 Papatango New Writing Prize for Orca, and it's not hard to see why. Aided by Frankie Bradshaw's wonderful set of distressed wood, moss and pebbles, he creates an isolated world in which wholly credible people are placed in terrible dilemmas. The love that binds Maggie to Joshua, her father, pulls her in the opposite way to the love that binds her to her sister, Fan. Likewise the all-encompassing requirement to fit into a closed culture pulls Maggie one way, as her commitment to truth pulls her another.

The script needs fine acting and it gets it. As Joshua, Simon Gregor bristles with barely suppressed violence at his elder daughter's refusal to fit in and cowers in obsequious fawning when The Father comes for Fan. Aden Gillett's Father is a giant bully of a man, his eyes flickering between Maggie and Fan, his aura of menace all too obvious to Maggie, if not Fan nor Joshua. Ellie Turner's Gretchen is a little underwritten (and possibly not really required for the story) but she delivers the role well, damaged forever by her experience as The Daughter.

The key roles of teen girls are dazzlingly acted. Rona Morison, fiery red hair and fiery green eyes, gives us a Maggie forced by her mother's early death to take on both a mother's duties and a father's resentment. Morison is especially good in her scenes with Gillett, flinching, but not giving in to her terrible memories, determined not to show that she, unlike the rest of the village, will confront The Father's tyranny. Carla Langley is utterly convincing as the bright spark, Fan, who can solve her sister's playground riddles (critically so, later in the play) and can dance at the annual ceremony in her sister's dress. It's crucial that Langley balance Fan's childish enthusiasm with hints of adult knowledge for the story to work, something she does with great skill. Two wonderful performances - a credit to director Alice Hamilton.

The play loses its confidence just a little in its final ten minutes, when it topples into a little too much exposition for my taste. Grinter, whose debut play this is, could trust his audience and his actors to try up the loose ends without quite so much being spelled out. But that's a minor fault in a tremendous production that has echoes of another five star show, The Awakening (earlier this year at the Brockley Jack Theatre) - so that's high praise indeed.

I was left recalling a comment made by Graham Linehan who, talking about his greatest creation, Father Ted, said that it could not be made in 2015 - not knowing what we know now. "What we know now" pervades every scene of this fine, subtle and important piece of theatre.

Orca continues at Southwark Playhouse until 26 November.

Photo Richard Lakos.

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