An incisive, unflinching insight into what makes a community tolerate the unthinkable.
‘One girl, against the happiness of the whole village. Can you not see it has to be done?’
Midsummer. The village must choose a new Daughter to sail with the fishing boats and bless the waters, keeping them safe from the roaming orcas for another year.
Fan hopes with all her heart to be the one they choose. But her older sister Maggie says she must never, never, go with the boats. Because something happened to Maggie out there. And no one will admit it.
Orca was the winner of the 2016 Papatango New Writing Prize in association with Southwark Playhouse, London, where it premiered in 2016.
‘an unnerving play… Grinter captures vividly the pressure to conform in an isolated society and the difficulty of resisting an insidious, persistent patriarchy… a genuine talent’
— Guardian
‘Beautifully sculpted… Grinter carefully constructs a world as soaked in myth and ritual as it is with salt water, and we are folded into its rhythms and expectations completely’
— Exeunt Magazine
‘[A] fine, subtle and important piece of theatre’
— Broadway World
‘Matt Grinter’s fine new play gently – and finally devastatingly – explores the way in which a small community moulds and reshapes its inhabitants, with sometimes brutal force.’
— Time Out
Papatango New Writing Prize
