Nanna Ingvarsson executes a star turn in the title role of one of Caryl Churchill’s more demanding texts, The Skriker. The Skriker is “a shapeshifter and death portent, ancient and damaged,” and she is accompanied by all manner of denizens from the underworld of British folk tales—spriggans, kelpies, brownies—in this story set in modern England, originally produced in 1994. The Skriker carries off one, perhaps two, young working-class women (the effective Katie Atkinson and Lindsay Haynes) to the deeps below a no-longer green and pleasant Britain. The narrative, although ultimately unsatisfying in its perfunctory conclusion, carries echoes of the Persephone myth as well.
The Skriker speaks a slippery, allusive, punning speech with a logic of its own that brings to mind Monty Python’s Word Association Football sketch rewritten by James Joyce, and Ingvarsson and director Kathleen Akerley deserve high marks for making the words, at times impenetrable on the page, meaningful and accessible. Here’s a fragment from the punishing opening monologue:
Out of her pinkle lippety loppety, out of her mouthtrap, out came my secreted garden flower of my youth and beauty and the beast is six six six o’clock in the morning becomes electric stormy petrel bomb.
If the no-frills production doesn’t always manage the scene transitions well, it should be credited with finding a use for the Warehouse’s door to the back parking lot (a kind of Hades itself) that opens directly into the auditorium. Many of the folklore characters will be unknown to American audiences (who, at best, might know who the Green Man is), so it’s too bad that Churchill doesn’t give us more time and text to get to know the excellently-named demon Rawheadandbloodybones.
- The Skriker, by Caryl Churchill, directed by Kathleen Akerley, Forum Theatre & Dance, Warehouse Theater, Washington