The Skriker

by Caryl Churchill

Overview

An extraordinary collision of ancient fairytale and fractured urban England.

In a broken world, two girls meet an extraordinary creature. The Skriker is a shapeshifter and death portent. She can be an old woman, a child, a young man. She is a faerie come from the Underworld to pursue and entrap them, through time and space, through this world and her own.

Caryl Churchill's play The Skriker was originally produced at the National Theatre, London, in 1994.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780013589
Publisher:	Hern, Nick Books
Publication date:	10/15/2014
Series:	NHB Modern Plays
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	52
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	12 Years

About the Author

Caryl Churchill is a leading playwright who has written widely for the stage, television and radio.

Her stage plays include: Owners (Royal Court Theatre, London, 1972); Objections to Sex and Violence (Royal Court, 1975); Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (Joint Stock, 1976); Vinegar Tom (Monstrous Regiment, 1976); Traps (Royal Court, 1977); Cloud Nine (Joint Stock, 1979); Three More Sleepless Nights (Soho Poly and Royal Court, 1980); Top Girls (Royal Court, 1982); Fen (Joint Stock, 1983); Softcops (RSC, 1984); A Mouthful of Birds with David Lan (Joint Stock, 1986); Serious Money (Royal Court and Wyndham's, London, then Public Theater, New York, 1987); Icecream (Royal Court, 1989); Mad Forest (Central School of Speech and Drama, then Royal Court, 1990); Lives of the Great Poisoners with Orlando Gough and Ian Spink (Second Stride, 1991); The Skriker (Royal National Theatre, 1994); Thyestes translated from Seneca (Royal Court, 1994); Hotel with Orlando Gough and Ian Spink (Second Stride, 1997); This is a Chair (Royal Court, 1997); Blue Heart (Joint Stock, 1997); Far Away (Royal Court, 2000, and Albery, London, 2001, then New York Theatre Workshop, 2002); A Number (Royal Court, 2002, then New York Theatre Workshop, 2004); A Dream Play after Strindberg (Royal National Theatre, 2005); Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? (Royal Court, 2006, then Public Theater, New York, 2008); Bliss, translated from Olivier Choinière (Royal Court, 2008); Seven Jewish Children – a play for Gaza (Royal Court, 2009); Love and Information (Royal Court, 2012); Ding Dong the Wicked (Royal Court, 2012); Here We Go (National Theatre, 2015); Escaped Alone (Royal Court, 2016), Pigs and Dogs (Royal Court, 2016), Glass. Kill. Bluebeard. Imp. (Royal Court, 2019) and What If If Only (Royal Court, 2021).

Editorial Reviews

British playwright Churchill has always shown an unusual knack for combining striking theatrical experimentation and remarkably detailed re-creation of everyday life. Rarely, however, has she woven the two strands of her writing as tightly together as in this play in which one character, the Skriker, speaks long passages of Joycean (specifically, "Finnegans Wake"-ish) prose ("Heard her boast beast a roast beef eater, daughter could spin span spick and spun the lowest form of wheat straw into gold"), while the two others, Liz and Josie, both teenage girls, speak a very contemporary brand of English. This startling juxtaposition allows Churchill simultaneously to explore contemporary attitudes about the homeless and insane and tell a variation of the folktale about the malevolent, magical being that tries to trick a young woman out of her firstborn. The resulting play is rich, beautiful, and moving, though it may frustrate those who like their theater plain and simple. It's also a delight, whether on page or stage, for those who like to puzzle through dense, difficult texts.

Jack Helbig

"It certainly loosened my grasp on reality." —Marissa Oberlander, Chicago Reader

“The Skriker is certainly the most unusual play I’ve seen in recent memory. The text, itself, is the pinnacle of what it means to be out-of-the-box… the proud weirdness, discombobulation, paranoia, transformation, and sinister magic of this play come together to build something unquestionably singular and blatantly eclectic.” – Johnny Oleksinski, Podunk critic

“This portrait of a London haunted by unhappy gremlins bears roughly the same relationship to urban living that Psycho does to taking a shower, turning the familiar into a hall of terrors. Afterward, you'll be even more intent than usual on avoiding the eyes of people on the streets, wondering what demons lurk inside. You'll even think twice before sitting on your sofa. Be afraid; be very afraid. (Or to borrow from the play's phrase-fracturing title character, an ailing, shape-shifting fairy, "Whatever you do don't open the do don't open the door.") Ms. Churchill, the author of "Fen" and "Top Girls," has delivered her most unsettling indictment yet of an incurably diseased world. While it is also her most densely cerebral, difficult work, its enveloping chill isn't just intellectual.” – Ben Brantley, New York Times

From the Publisher