The Skriker
EN302: European Theatre
Caryl Churchill (1938-)
• Wrote extensively
for radio in her
early career
• Oeuvre of feminist
and socialist drama,
including:
•
•
•
•
Vinegar Tom (1976)
Cloud Nine (1979)
Top Girls (1982)
A Mouthful of Birds
(1986)
• The Skriker (1994)
• A Number (2002)
What is the Skriker?
• “…a shapeshifter and
death portent, ancient
and damaged” (9)
SKRIKER. Lily, I’ll level
with you, ok? You
ready for this? I am
an ancient fairy,
hundreds of years old
as you people would
work it out. (23)
What is the Skriker?
She appears as:
• “WOMAN about 50… Dowdy,
cardigan, could be a patient” (17)
• “a derelict woman… shouting in
the street” (18)
• “an American woman of about
40 who is slightly drunk” (19)
• “part of the sofa, invisible to
them” (26)
• “A SMALL CHILD” (29)
• “a MAN about 30” (46)
• “MARIE, a young woman about
LILY’s age” (51)
• “a shabby respectable MAN
about 40” (53)
• “a very ill old woman” (54)
What is the Skriker?
As Elaine Aston
observes,
• “…the Skriker plays low
status (a needy child,
an old woman) and
high status roles
(business woman,
would-be lover) – but
always in relations that
are hierarchical,
vampiric and never
mutual.” (2003: 31)
Folklore characters
SKRIKER. Kelpie gallops
them into the loch
stock and barrel of fun
fair enough and eats
them, falls out of the
water into love with a
ladylike, his head in
her lap lap lap, her
hand in his hairy, there
is sand in it there is
and there is sand and
shells shock. (10)
• KELPIE: This is the fearsome
and malevolent water spirit of
Scottish folklore. … It would
appear to unsuspecting young
women as a lover, eventually
abducting them and
devouring them under the
water. The Kelpie would also
entice wandering children or
unwary young men to mount
him in the guise of a sleek
horse on the shore of the
loch. The fiend would then
gallop off into the water,
dragging down his victims and
devouring all but the entrails,
which would float to the
surface. (Rose 1996: 178)
Folklore characters
SKRIKER. Bloody Bones
hides in the dark dark
dark we all go into the
dark cupboard love all.
See through the slit
where he sits on piles
of bloody boney was a
warrior and chews
whom he likes. Dollop
gollop fullup. (10)
• RAW HEAD AND BLOODY BONES:
This is an evil spirit or water
demon in the folklore of
Lancashire, Lincolnshire, and
Yorkshire in England. … This
demon is described as the gory
semblance of a human that has
blood running down its face, and
is usually observed seated on a
pile of bones. It is essentially a
nursery bogie that is said to be
lurking in stagnant ponds, marl
pits, or in the understairs
cupboards of a house. From
these gruesome places it watches
and awaits its opportunity to
drag impetuous and defiant
children to their demise. (Rose
1996: 275)
Folklore characters
• Visible to us but largely invisible to Lily and Josie:
representative of other invisible forces?
• Most of the background characters exhibit vampiric relations
of some sort; many of them are associated with luring
children to their deaths (e.g. Jennie Greenteeth and Black
Annis)
Fairy tales
• The Fairies by Charles Perrault [read]
• When Lily is kind to the Skriker (in the latter’s guise as a homeless
woman), “Pound coins come out of her mouth when she speaks”
(18); when, conversely, Josie refuses to give her either money or a
kiss, “As she speaks toads come out of her mouth” (26).
• The kind girl / unkind girl dichotomy is complicated by the fact that
Josie recognises the Skriker, but Lily does not.
JOSIE. Toads, what you do that for, I’m not toads inside, it’s you
that’s toads. (28)
• Note that Lily is not, in fact, ultimately rewarded for her kindness.
• Geraldine Cousin: “The Skriker is, finally, not so much a fairy story as
a warning against believing in fairy stories – at least the kind where
everyone lives happily ever after.” (1996: 186)
Fairy tales and the unconscious
• Ralf Erik Remshardt describes the Skriker’s underworld as
“transparently the realm of dreams, fears, and desires” (1995:
122).
• For Elaine Aston, the Skriker and the other spirits “stand for
the damaged semiotic (in the Kristevan sense): the
marginalised ‘other’ that haunts the symbolic order – an
invisible, repressed world, made visible” (2003: 29).
• The Skriker seems to feed on Josie’s dreams and memories:
SKRIKER. Haven’t I wrapped myself up rapt rapture ruptured
myself in your dreams, scoffed your chocolate screams,
your Jung men and Freud eggs, your flying and fleeing?
(38)
Fairy tales and the unconscious
• Ann Wilson:
• “As this brief and playfully associative speech suggests, the Skriker
scoffs at Freudian and Jungian explanations of the unconscious and
in the taunting, refuses to be contained by them. The associative
language of the Skriker, a death portent and so a figure of absence,
marks the insistent return of the repressed which haunts all
language.” (1998: 181)
• “In The Skriker, Churchill refuses the audience a sense of mastery.
Mastery always involves domination (in the case of interpretation, of
understanding fully the action and hence, being able to control and
contain its effect.) … It is a mode of social regulation and
containment based on relations of power which are, by definition,
hierarchical and potentially oppressive. From this perspective,
Churchill’s refusal to allow the audience access to a position of
interpretive “mastery” over The Skriker is an act of political
resistance.” (Wilson 1998: 187)
Fairy tales and the unconscious
• The Juniper Tree by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm [read]
• Claudia Barnett argues that the Skriker “is more witch than goblin
and embodies maternal desires” (2000: 48). She quotes Jung’s
description of the “mother archetype”:
• “The qualities associated with it are maternal solicitude and
sympathy; the magic authority of the female; the wisdom and
spiritual exaltation that transcend reason; any helpful instinct or
impulse; all that is benign, all that cherishes and sustains, that fosters
growth and fertility. The place of magic transformation and rebirth,
together with the underworld and its inhabitants, are presided over
by the mother. On the negative side the mother archetype may
connote anything secret, hidden, dark; the abyss, the world of the
dead, anything that devours, seduces, and poisons, that is terrifying
and inescapable like fate.”
• Barnett goes on to argue that “even though the characters coincide
with Jungian archetypes and fairy-tale stereotypes, they do not
conform to gender-role expectations” (2000: 53).
Changeling tales
JOSIE. She’s a changeling.
LILY. She what?
JOSIE. That’s not your baby. They’ve put one of theirs and
taken yours off. (43)
• The Elves (third tale) by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm [read]
• Read pp. 44-5
• Postnatal depression? Postnatal psychosis?
Environmental damage
• Geraldine Cousin: “The Skriker… is a cautionary tale, a forceful and
timely reminder of the ecological disaster that may await our
descendants in the near future if we fail to learn to use the Earth’s
resources more wisely.” (1998: 189)
• Wordplay: note nuclear power stations in opening speech (Dungeness,
Sizewell)
SKRIKER. They used to leave us cream in a sorcerer’s apprentice. Gave
the brownie a pair of trousers to wear have you gone? Now they
hate us and hurt hurtle faster and master. They poison me in my
rivers of blood poisoning makes my arm swelter. (12)
• This is clearly not an elegy for lost folklore (see Churchill’s Vinegar Tom).
SKRIKER. You people are killing me, do you know that? I am sick, I am
a sick woman. (22)
Environmental damage
JOSIE. And now no one tastes any good?
SKRIKER. Dry as dustpans, foul as shitpandemonium. Poison
in the food chain saw massacre.
JOSIE. If I could just go and see. I’d come back.
SKRIKER. Shall I take you in my pocket pick it up and tuck it
in?
JOSIE. Yes please.
SKRIKER. Up in the smokey hokey pokey? up in the world
wind? up in the war zone ozone zany grey? (37-8)
Environmental damage
SKRIKER. Have you noticed the large number of
meteorological phenomena lately? Earthquakes.
Volcanoes. Drought. Apocalyptic meteorological
phenomena. The increase of sickness. It was always
possible to think whatever your personal problem,
there’s always nature. Spring will return, even if it’s
without me. Nobody loves me but at least it’s a sunny
day. This had been a comfort to people as long as
they’ve existed. But it’s not available any more. Sorry.
Nobody loves me and the sun’s going to kill me. Spring
will return and nothing will grow. (48-9)
Environmental damage
SKRIKER. If she was back on earth where on earth where
was the rockabye baby gone the treetop? Lost and gone
for everybody was dead years and tears ago, it was
another cemetery, a black whole hundred yearns. […]
But when the daughters grand and great greater
greatest knew she was from the distant past master
class, then rage raging bullfight bullroar.
The GIRL bellows wordless rage at LILY. (56)
Postmodernity and
disconnection
• Lily’s failure to explain how a TV works (pp. 20-1)
JOSIE. Everything’s flat here like a video. (43)
• The underworld scene as musical theatre?
• “Light, music, long table with feast, lavishly dressed people and
creatures… It looks wonderful except that it is all glamour and
here and there it is not working – some of the food is twigs,
leaves, beetles, some of the clothes are rags, some of the
beautiful people have a claw hand or hideous face” (34-5)
SKRIKER. So the Skriker sought fame and fortune telling,
celebrity knockout drops, TV stardomination, chat
showdown and market farces… (41)
The Skriker as global
capitalism?
• For Amich, the Skriker “reflects the negative effects of globalization:
feeding on people, sucking their blood, her body suffers the ravages
of capitalism and the environmental ills it produces” (2007: 400).
• According to Elin Diamond, Churchill’s work explores “what it feels
like in the 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” (2006: 476).
• Diamond finds Jameson’s description of the postmodern ‘dilemma’
helpful: “one that involves our insertion as individual subjects into a
multidimensional set of radically discontinuous realities, whose
frames range from the still surviving spaces of bourgeois private life
all the way to the unimaginable decentring of global capitalism
itself.” (2006: 477, quoting Jameson 1991: 413)
The Skriker as global
capitalism?
• The Skriker is insidious: both Lily and Josie choose to be
exploited by the Skriker, lured in by false promises and shortterm gain).
GIRL. Don’t eat or you’ll never get back. (36)
•
Compare Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’?
SKRIKER. Don’t you want to feel global warm and happy
every after? Warm the cackles of your heartless. (36)
The Skriker as global
capitalism?
• “A BUSINESSMAN with a
THRUMPIN riding on his
back. He doesn’t know it’s
there. … He is joined by
colleagues, all with
THRUMPINS, for a meeting.
They are talking but we
can’t hear what they say.
All we can hear is a shrill
twittering wordless
conversation among the
THRUMPINS.” (41)
• THRUMPIN: A spirit in the
folklore of the Border
counties between Scotland
and England, it was
described as a sprite that
remained with the
individual throughout his
or her life. Unlike the
Guardian Angel, whose
duties were to preserve the
life of its human charge,
the Thrumpin had the
power to terminate the
human’s existence. (Rose
1996: 308)
The Skriker as global
capitalism?
• Working class single mothers in 1994: class and gender politics
• Peter Lilley speech, 1992:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOx8q3eGq3g
• Candice Amich:
• “In Britain, as in the United States, the 1990s saw the demonization
of single motherhood as part of an ideological campaign to justify the
privatization of social services and the elimination of welfare
benefits. Thus, Josie and Lily’s vulnerable position in the economy as
young, single, unemployed mothers is a direct consequence of the
forces of neo-liberal globalization, which aim to eliminate all traces of
social welfare.” (2007: 398)
• The Skriker takes a kind of voyeuristic glee in global catastrophe in
her guise as the man, comparing environmental disaster to “a pileup
on the motorway” and “snuff movies” (49).
• “Ultimately, I am inclined to argue the Skriker as a nemesis figure: an
ancient, avenging figure unleashed on a world that continues to
neglect its mothers, its children, its future.” (Aston 2003: 31)
Biobliography
• Amich, Candice (2007) ‘Bringing the Global Home: The Commitment of Caryl
Churchill’s The Skriker’, Modern Drama 50: 3, pp. 394-413.
• Aston, Elaine (2003) Feminist Views on the English Stage: Women Playwrights,
1990-2000, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Barnett, Claudia (2000) ‘“Reveangance is gold mine, sweet”: Alchemy and
Archetypes in Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker’, Essays in Theatre 19: 1, pp. 45-57.
• Cousin, Geraldine (1996) Women in Dramatic Place and Time: Contemporary
Female Characters On Stage, London & New York: Routledge.
• Cousin, Geraldine (1998) ‘Owning the Disowned: The Skriker in the Context of
Earlier Plays by Caryl Churchill’, in Sheila Rabillard [ed.] Essays on Caryl Churchill:
Contemporary Representations, Winnipeg: Blizzard Publishing, pp. 189-205.
• Diamond, Elin (2006) ‘Caryl Churchill: Feeling Global’ in Mary Luckhurst [ed.] A
Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama 1880-2005, Malden, Oxford &
Carlton: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 476-87.
• Jameson, Fredric (1991) Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Remshardt, Ralf Erik (1995), ‘The Skriker’ (review), Theatre Journal 47: 1, pp.
121-3.
• Rose, Carol (1996) Spirits, Fairies, Gnomes, and Goblins: an Encyclopedia of the
Little People, Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO.
• Wilson, Ann (1998) ‘Failure and the Limits of Representation in The Skriker’, in
Sheila Rabillard [ed.] Essays on Caryl Churchill: Contemporary Representations,
Winnipeg: Blizzard Publishing, pp. 174-88.