1. The Skriker
Caryl Churchill

2. A Dream Play (2005)

4. Cloud Nine (1979)

5. Top Girls (1982)

6. When one character starts speaking before the other has finished, the point of interruption is marked / as in
JOSIE. They will / if you ask. LILY. I don’t think so.
2) A character sometimes continues speaking right through another’s speech, e.g.:
LILY. Get away, you’re crazy. / (To SKRIKER.) It’s all
JOSIE. It’s her.
SKRIKER. Mum, make her go away.
LILY. right. (To JOSIE.) I never want / to see you

7. Serious Money (1987)

8. Far Away (2000)

9. Escaped Alone (2016)

10. Kathryn Hunter as The Skriker

11. SKRIKER. I am an ancient fairy, I am hundreds of years old as you people would work it out, I have been around through all the stuff you would call history… not a major spirit but a spirit… I am here to do good. (23)

12. “WOMAN about 50… Dowdy, cardigan, could be a patient” (17)
“A derelict woman is shouting in the street.” (18)
“An American woman of about 40 who is slightly drunk.” (19)
“Derelict WOMAN muttering and shouting in the street.” (25)
“…part of the sofa, invisible to them.” (26)
“A SMALL CHILD.” (29)
“A MONSTER.” (37)
“A smart WOMAN in mid thirties.” (41)
“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)

14. “…I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

15. SKRIKER. Heard her boast beast a roast beef eater, daughter could spin span spick and spun the lowest of wheat straw into gold, raw into roar, golden lion and lyonesse under the sea, dungeonesse under the castle for bad mad sad adders and takers away. Never marry a king size well beloved…(9)

16. JENNY GREENTEETH
KELPIE
BLACK ANNIS
RAWHEADANDBLOODYBONES
YALLERY BROWN
PASSERBY
GIRL WITH TELESCOPE
MAN WITH CLOTH AND BUCKET

17. Matthias Grünewald, The Temptation of St. Anthony (c. 1512)

18. John Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare (1781)

19. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Goblin Market illustrations (1862)

20. 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 fleeting? (38)
“What a pretty tie. I wish I were tied to someone who was pure, and had pretty eyes. I’m fond of pretty eyes. Fond of lies.”

21. The Skriker offers “[an] ethical translation of the presumed unintelligibility of psychosis into meaningful theatrical communication… Notably, the theatre space offers a meta-theatrical twist to this delusional notion of impostors as it redoubles the notion of reality and illusion, actor and character.”
Anna Harpin, Performance, Madness and Psychiatry: Isolated Acts (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

22. Sarah Kane, Cleansed (1998)

24. It looks wonderful except that it is all glamour and here and there it’s 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. But the first impression is of a palace. SKRIKER is a fairy queen, dressed grandiosely, with lapses. (34)

26. Mules and Men (1936)

28. SKRIKER. So you both want me. That’s nice. (33)

29. “[t]he technology of contemporary society is therefore mesmerizing and fascinating not so much in its own right but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp: the whole new decentered global network of the third stage of capital itself.”
Fredric Jameson, quoted in Candice Amich, “Bringing the Global Home: The Commitment of Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker,” Modern Drama, April 5, 2013.

30. SKRIKER. So how does this work. LILY. How. SKRIKER. How does it – LILY
SKRIKER. So how does this work? LILY. How? SKRIKER. How does it – LILY. You want to turn it off? SKRIKER. No, how does that picture get here. From wherever. LILY. How does it work? SKRIKER. Yes. […] SKRIKER. It’s happening there and it’s / here. (20)

31. “Through the omnipresence onstage of anonymous characters and nasty figures from British folklore, Churchill exposes the illusion that one can create a private space safe from the ominous forces of global capital.”
Elin Diamond, “Caryl Churchill: Feeling Global,” A Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama: (London: Blackwell, 2008).

32. SKRIKER. They used to leave cream in a sorcerer’s apprentice… Now they hate us and hurt hurtle faster and master. They poison me in my rivers of blood poisoning makes my arm swelter. (12)

33. 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 has 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. Some people might feel concerned about that. But it makes me feel important. I’m going to be around when the world as we know it ends. I’m going to witness unprecedented catastrophe. I like a pileup on the motorway. I like the kind of war we’re having lately. I like snuff movies. But this is going to be the big one. (48)

35. “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.”
Geraldine Cousin, “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, 1998).

36. SKRIKER. ‘Am I in fairylanded. ’ she wandered
SKRIKER. ‘Am I in fairylanded?’ she wandered. ‘No,’ said the old crony, ‘this is the real world’… Lost and gone for everybody was dead years and tears ago, it was another cemetery, a black whole hundred yearns. And this old dear me was Lily’s granddaughter what a horror storybook ending. […] The GIRL bellows wordless rage at LILY (56)

37. We Turned On The Light (2005) Composed by Orlando Gough, libretto by Caryl Churchill
We turned on the light And flooded the city We drove the car faster And saw the dust blowing We bought a new tee shirt And turned the grass yellow We ate cherries in winter And heard the gale howling We wrapped food in plastic And saw the bears starving We chopped down a forest And heard a child choking We doubled our output And killed to get water We flew to the sunshine And saw the ice falling My granddaughter’s granddaughter says to my ghost: I hate you. My ghost says: Sorry, I’m sorry now. My granddaughter’s granddaughter says to my ghost: Didn’t you love me? My ghost says: Not enough. It’s hard to love people far away in time.