REVIEW: Orca at the People's Theatre, Newcastle
It's not all fun beside the seaside...
There’s no use pretending this makes for a particularly comfortable evening in the theatre – nor, I imagine, was it ever intended to be so.
Matt Grinter’s debut play, winner of the coveted Papatango Prize for new writing in 2016, is set in an island fishing community where pods of orca (killer whales) are sometimes seen from the boats but the most potent dangers lie on land.
The nature of those dangers in this patriarchal micro-society emerges gradually, as if through a sea mist, hinted at but never defined with absolute clarity.
We sense them in the painfully suppressed fear of fisherman’s daughter Maggie (Minnie Dobson) as her younger sister Fan (Holly Stamp) revels in the excitement of a forthcoming contest.
She’s to dance for the honour of being picked to play The Daughter in some island ritual which also involves a figure called The Father. It’s “something that’s part of us,” we’re told; “the thing that we do”.
For anyone with a modicum of savvy, alarm bells should be ringing already.
But this is a place wholly cut off. Neither Maggie nor Fan has ever been to the mainland.
Holly Stamp is magnetic as Fan, radiating innocent delight at the prospect of being the chosen one – chosen, it grows more ominously apparent, as some sort of lamb to the slaughter.
Nobody listens to Maggie, not least the girls’ father, the widowed Joshua (Mark Burden), who buys into the idea of his elder daughter as a troublesome “bad apple” and “black sheep”, and indulges Fan’s eager anticipation.
The awfulness of what’s unfolding in plain sight becomes a little clearer with the arrival of two more characters, young Gretchen (Ashton Matthews), seemingly washed up so Fan thinks she might be a mermaid, and later, to retrieve her, her father who is also The Father (Sean Burnside).
Or is he only The Father? The questions hang over this play in which the dawning comes – painfully slowly in the case of Joshua – with more than a hint of thunder.
It’s all about hints and rumours, as often happens in real-life cases of abuse before the storm finally breaks and the scales fall from people’s eyes.
From an audience perspective, there’s no comfortably satisfying resolution. Not even a Sergeant Neil Howie, as played by Edward Woodward in 1973 folk-horror film The Wicker Man, to investigate (although we’re definitely in that territory – and look at what happened to him!).
Sara Jo Harrison’s production looks good, set on a sort of jetty that screams ‘fishing village’, and with props that evoke salt and sea air.
And a notable addition to the Matt Grinter script is an extra character, Mother (Rhiannon Wilson), who drifts around like a mournful phantom, singing about the harbour wall being “the edge of the world” to the plangent tones of an organ.
So, not one to send you skipping out into the night. It’s the People’s rightly revelling in its well-equipped studio space to give us drama that might otherwise pass us by – and perhaps getting gloom and misery out of its system before the silliness of panto season on the main stage.
Orca runs until Saturday, November 29. Tickets from the People’s Theatre website.