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Chop chip pan chap finger chirrup chirrup cheer up off with you're making no headway.
- the Skriker
SINCE THE 1960S, BRITISH PLAYWRIGHT CARYL CHURCHILL HAS TACKLED pressing social and political concerns in plays that strain against the conventions and limits of theatrical representation. She is widely known for works such as Cloud Nine and Top Girls, but her half-century oeuvre includes an array of experimental one-act dramas, successful radio and television pieces, as well as numerous interdisciplinary dance-theatre collaborations. If she is, as Tony Kushner has claimed, the "greatest living English-language playwright" (qtd. in Savran 24), this honor should be linked to her groundbreaking experiments with the fantastic. From Mad Forest's ravenous vampire, to Fen's furious revenants, to the temporal paradoxes of Traps, to the cloned doubles of A Number, Churchill's work repeatedly challenges expectations in an industry whose mainstream is still dominated by naturalistic writing. Of all these forays, her 1994 play The Skriker, which debuted at London's Royal National Theatre (directed by Les Waters), stands as one of the boldest attempts in recent decades to explore theatre's affinity for fantastic worlds and creatures.
The play is produced frequently on stages worldwide, despite being initially regarded by critics as one of Churchill's least accessible works. Though set in contemporary England, it begins with "a giant riding on a piglike man, throwing stones11 (9), an image foreshadowing the phantasmagoria that will infuse the dramatic landscape: a Kelpie, a Green Lady, a Brownie, a Dead Child, a Sprig - gan, a creature named Rawheadandbloodybones, to name just a handful. The strangeness and symbolic obscurity of these creatures is exceeded only in the Skriker itself, whose eight-minute prologue ("Slit slat slut. That bitch a botch an itch in my shoulder blood . . ." [9]) announces one of Churchill's most radical experiments with language. This eponymous entity, described tersely by the playwright as "a shapeshifter and death portent, ancient and damaged" (9) , latches onto two young women named Josie and Lily, the former of whom has killed her own baby for reasons that are never explained. After Josie's release from a psychiatric hospital, Lily gives birth to a child of her own, and what could be called the play's plot follows the struggles of these...