The Papatango prize for new writing has a happy knack of discovering distinctive voices: past winners have included Luke Owen’s Unscorched, about the monitoring of child abuse, and Dawn King’s rurally dystopian Foxfinder. This year’s winner, Matt Grinter, shows similar promise with an unnerving play about a mythical ritual sacrifice that acts as a metaphor for the present.
The setting is a remote island which, judging by the accents, could be off the Scottish coast. Each year a fishing village re-enacts an ancient legend in which a young girl gave her life to a killer whale in order to save the community. We watch in nervous anticipation as Maggie, a carpenter’s child who has previously played the symbolic role of the laurel-wreathed Daughter in the annual pageant, desperately tries to stop her younger sister, Fan, from following in her desolate footsteps.
The solution to the riddle of what the ritual entails is easily foreseeable, but Grinter captures vividly the pressure to conform in an isolated society and the difficulty of resisting an insidious, persistent patriarchy: I was reminded at different times of The Wicker Man, Jaws and Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea. Frankie Bradshaw has created an outstanding set, in which a rotting wooden jetty juts into the audience and Alice Hamilton’s production is richly atmospheric and very well acted. Carla Langley as the naively optimistic Fan and Rona Morison as the ostracised Maggie are totally plausible siblings and Aden Gillett as the village headman cloaks his threats to the girls under a disarming smile. Grinter, on this evidence, has a genuine talent to disturb.
• At Southwark Playhouse, London, until 26 November. Box office: 020-7407 0234.
