In The Skriker, playwright Caryl Churchill combines narrative text with dance and pantomime to create a mysteriously magical play that incorporates many of the elements associated with performance art and feminist drama.
The Skriker is set partly in modem-day London and partly in a rotting, mythic underworld inhabited by the Skriker and creatures from British folklore who accompany her on her journeys to the upper, modern world.
The three main characters in the play are the Skriker, "an ancient and damaged fairy," and two young women, Josie, and Lily, her pregnant friend.
The Skriker is a shape-shifter, and she appears to Josie and Lily in a variety of guises as she stalks them and tries to induce them to accompany her to the underworld. The two women do their best to defend themselves and the baby that Lily gives birth to partway through the play as they contend with a dying ecosystem and the threat that the Skriker poses to them.
Universal themes of love, revenge, and loss are interwoven throughout the play with more topical, socio-political themes of feminism, environmentalism, climate change, and humankind's responsibility for the wanton destruction of the planet, and with an underlying mystical theme of the modern world's estrangement from the realm of the spirit.
“You people are killing me, do you know that?” the Skriker says. “I am sick, I am a sick woman.”
The Skriker is a dark but funny play that ultimately holds out no hope for the future. The Skriker and her followers are simply no match for the patriarchal mismanagement of the world.
Sunday, June 26, 2016
What are the themes in The Skriker?
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