The Skriker (1994)
Caryl Churchill
Elin Diamond on The Skriker and
‘feeling global’
• ‘What it feels like in our nervous system to live
in times of social and political struggle, or, as
in the last decades, at a time when
multinational capital, not political debate,
destabilizes the psychic and social frameworks
of human connection.’
Frederic Jameson, quoted by Diamond
Link between ‘the still surviving spaces of
bourgeois private life’ and ‘the unimaginable
decentering of global capital itself.’
The ‘Underworld’ in Fen and The
Skriker
• To tamper with this space—and with the
fictional dramatic world in which the dead
stay dead—is to insist on a different way of
seeing, a different order. (Elin Diamond)
What is the Skriker?
• The Skriker – ‘a shape-shifter and death
portent, ancient and damaged’.
• Skriker’s guises:
– old crone
– disturbed child
– loud American woman
– enraged male stalker
• ‘You people are killing me, do you know that?
I am sick, I am a sick woman.’
Lily re. her baby:
I know everyone’s born. I can’t help it.
Everything’s shifted round so she’s in the
middle.
Ending
Skriker:
And this old dear me was Lily’s granddaughter
what a horror storybook ending. ‘Oh I was
tricked tracked wracked,’ cried our heroine
distress, ‘I hoped to save the worldly, I hoped I’d
make the fury better than she should be.’ And
what would be comfy of her now? She didn’t
know if she ate a mortal morsel she’d crumble to
dust panic.
Lily:
[…] What? What’s happening? my teeth. I’m sick.
Help me. What is it? It’s money. Is it? Out of my
mouth?
Pound coins come out of her mouth when she
speaks. She stops talking and examines the money.
Skriker:
So lily in the pink … talking taking aching waking all
night to reach retch wrench more and more and
more… cash dash flash in the panic of time
The Skriker and Folklore
•
•
•
•
Skriker – Lancashire goblin and death portent
Yallery Brown – evil fairy
Black Dog – the Skriker’s other shape
Jennie Greenteeth – bogie that drags children into
ponds
• Kelpie – bogie/ water horse and body eater
• Rawheadandbloodybones – Lancashire water demon
that drags children into ponds and devours them (in
Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, a ‘spectre, mentioned to
frighten children’.
Yallery Brown
Jennie Greenteeth
Kelpie
Rawheadandbloodybones
Alison Croggon on The Skriker, VCA School of
Drama, Melbourne, Australia (2006)
[…] in the theatre foyer, a boy, up to this point
seemingly another member of the audience, is
turned into a pig. Inside the theatre, we hear the
sounds of animal howls and shrieks, and the beasts
begin to hammer on the door [….] And thus we are
led into a claustrophobic tunnel like a cattle race,
dimly and obscurely lit by a single reddish-yellow
lightbulb. It is like the inside of a womb […] We
emerge into a corral, surrounded by higher
platforms on all sides; the lights widen, and human
speech begins to emerge from the squeals and
growls.
Croggon (cont.)
Much of the text—the words of the Skriker, the
damaged fairy—is a collage of word association,
in which meaning is on the verge of slipping into
nonsense.
Slit slat slut. That bitch a botch an itch in
my shoulder blood. Bitch botch itch. Slat
itch slit botch. Itch slut bitch slit. […]
Whatever you do don’t open to do don’t
open the door […]
Croggon (cont.)
• This is language as thickness, viscera, weight,
saliva, sex, violence, the softness of palate and
lip: language as spell and enchantment, where
meaning constantly threatens to slip its noose
and collapse back to animal howl and croon.
Enviromental damage
• ‘Have you noticed the large number of meteorological
phenomena lately? Earthquakes. Volcanoes. Drought …
The increase of sickness. It was always possible to think
whatever your personal problem, there’s always
nature. Spring will return, even it it’s without me. …
But it’s not available any more. Sorry. Nobody loves me
and the sun’s going to kill me.’ [Skriker as man]
• ‘Postmodernism is what you have when the
modernization process is complete and nature is gone
for good.’ (Frederic Jameson, cited in Diamond)
Critical Bibliography
Candice Amich, ‘Bringing the Global Home: The Commitment
of Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker’, Modern Drama, 50: 3
(Autumn 2007), 394-413
Elaine Aston, Feminist Views on the English Stage: Women
Playwrights 1990-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003)
Geraldine Cousins, ‘Owning the Disowned: The Skriker’, in
Rabillard (ed.), Essays on Caryl Churchill: Contemporary
Representations (Winnipeg: Blizzard, 1998)
Alison Croggon, ‘Theatre Notes’ blog,
http://theatrenotes.blogspot.co.uk/2006/09/skriker.html
Elin Diamond, ‘Caryl Churchill: Feeling Global’, in Luckhurst
(ed.), A Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama
1880-2005 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 476-487