MIF15: The Skriker @ Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

Review by Jamie Dunn | 06 Jul 2015

The Skriker opens with a verbal assault. In some nightmarish netherworld, the title character, played by a pixie-haired, wild-eyed Maxine Peake, delivers a baffling soliloquy of fierce intensity. She speaks in cut-up poetics, blending idioms with alliterative puns to create a dizzying Dadaist language that would make Beckett or Burroughs proud. “Weeps seeps deeps her pretty puff cream hole in the heart operation,” is a typical Skriker line. It’s not clear if this is meant to make any sense, but one thing's for sure: Peake means every syllable.

Things get more lucid in the next act. We learn the Skriker is an eons-old fairy with a sadistic side. She gets a kick out of snuff movies, motorway pile-ups and natural disasters. At the start of the play she’s already corrupted one innocent: Josie, a young mum who’s serving time in an asylum after seemingly murdering her child while under the Skriker’s influence. The mythical being has her sights set on beguiling another target: Lily, Josie’s best friend, who is heavily pregnant.

Peake’s malevolent creature is dazzlingly seductive. She takes on many forms, from a loudmouth businesswoman in sunglasses to an old crone laden with shopping bags, to a needy orphaned child who wants Lily to take her home and adopt her. These transformations are achieved by Peake simply changing jackets. During the play’s centrepiece, a baroque banquet where human flesh is on the menu, she resembles Marie Antoinette as imagined by Tim Burton. What the Skriker wants with these two young mothers is never made explicit, but she seems to crave human contact and gets her strength from the pain she causes, like a vampire.

Director Sarah Frankcom’s in-the-round staging of Caryl Churchill's dark fairytale is bracing, set low in the bowels of the Royal Exchange Theatre. Two thirds of the audience look down on the debauched action, while the other third is in among it, sat at long wooden tables which form the stage, with Peake and her fellow players skipping from table to table with surefooted vigor. We were part of the audience at stage level, immersed in the chaos, inches away from the actors and close enough to see the bruises and scratches on Peake’s arms and legs from throwing herself around the deck.

Much of the publicity leading up to this Manchester International Festival production leaned heavily on the play’s global warming themes. These allusions are there, most clearly when the Skriker states, “Nobody loves me and the sun's going to kill me.” But there’s much more here to chew on. The Skriker appears to feed off mankind’s destructive emotions: greed, selfishness, anger. When the mood takes her, she can shine riches upon you – at one point, she makes gold coins pour from Lily's mouth. To those out of her favour, however, she brings misery – when Josie rejects the Skriker she begins coughing up toads. In this age of austerity and social inequality, an anti-capitalism subtext makes for a more compelling reading.

Churchill's play is also a beautiful study in the intensity of teenage female friendship. The two girls care deeply for each other, they may even be willing to die to protect one another, but this bond is sullied by competitiveness and jealousy. Laura Elsworthy and Juma Sharkah, as Josie and Lily, add a warmth and a vulnerability to counter Peake’s hard edges. As it spins from the real world to phantasma and back again, they keep the play grounded, humane.

Beyond this triumvirate, the stage is also populated by a dozen or so of the Skriker’s minions, a rag-tag of fairyland creatures in eclectic costumes – some wear plush velvet, others are in fetish gear. These performers don’t say much, but they add colour and texture to Frankcom’s stripped-back set, and give it an epic quality in the passages where Peake’s verbal fireworks give way to pure song and movement. Special mention should go to Alex Austin, listed in the programme as 'passer by,' who spends most of the play dancing after the Skriker casts a spell on him. Like this ravishing production as a whole, we’re never exactly sure why he’s doing what he’s doing, but we loved his energy and couldn’t take our eyes off him.


The Skriker had its world premiere at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, on 4 Jul. It runs until 18 Jul (not 13), 7.30pm, Saturdays 2.30pm and 8pm

Images by Jonathan Keenan.

http://mif.co.uk/event/the-skriker