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by Caryl Churchill, directed by Daniel Pagett

Red One Theatre Collective, The Storefront Theatre, Toronto

October 23-November 2, 2014

Skriker: “If she can’t guessing game and safety match my name then I’ll take

her no mistake no mister no missed her no mist no miss no me no”

Daniel Pagett certainly chose a tough play for his directorial debut.  Caryl Churchill may be one of the great British playwrights of the last century, but The Skriker (1994) is a play even fans of Churchill find puzzling and some have called “impossible” to stage because of its unusual demands.  Pagett has devised a way of staging the play that works well in it own way even if it leaves the central dynamics of the action unclear.  The principal actors give such excellent performances that anyone with an interest in Churchill or in modern drama should see the show while they can. 

The last time Toronto saw The Skriker was in a workshop production staged as part of World Stage in 1998.  The play is so difficult that the group assigned to do it managed to stage only a selection of scenes.  The rest were simply read from the script.  That’s why the current production is so important.  It is really the first complete staging of the play in Toronto. 

In approaching The Skriker, the first difficulty is deciding what in the world the play is about.  It mixes a hodgepodge of supernatural beings from English folk tales with the story of two teenaged sisters.  One, Josie (Suzette McCanny), has been put in a mental asylum for having killed her 10-day-old baby.  The other, Lily (Perrie Olthuis), is pregnant and expects to give birth soon.  Once Josie has been discharged from the asylum, Lily offers to have her stay with her in London until she is ready to face the world again.

The world in this play, however, is extremely bizarre.  It is not too different from the world in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, the first of which was published three years after The Skriker.  In both Churchill and Rowling, every fantastic or supernatural creature of myth or folktale actually does exist.  In both ordinary humans cannot see these creatures even though the creatures may affect what people do.  In Rowling only those humans with magical powers can see them.  In Churchill only those who are mad can do so.  As a result, Lily is aware of a world filled with terrifying beings of all sorts, while Josie, who is initially unaware of them, gradually has to learn to identify them beneath the disguises they we wear.     

The play does not begin with Josie and Lilly, whose real-world problems and tensions we can understand.  Instead, it begins in the Underworld with a long prologue spoken by the Skriker (Claire Armstrong) herself.  Churchill’s notes identify the Skriker as “a shapeshifter and death portent, ancient and damaged”.  This phrase is a key to understanding Churchill’s use of the supernatural.  A “skriker” (literally “shrieker”) is specifically the Lancashire name for a spirit generally known as the Black Dog.  It is this ghostly spirit that inspired Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902).  In Churchill’s play it represents the supernatural realm that used to dominate Europe before human beings and their machines took over.  It is damaged both because of lack of man’s lack of respect for nature and lack of belief in the supernatural. 

Central to the structure Churchill’s play, however, is that the Skriker is a shapeshifter.  During the course of the action we meet a host of fantastic beings  – a kelpie, a spriggan, a brownie and many others – who appear in the underworld, or we might say the otherworld scenes with the Skriker.  Most important is that the nine other humanoid beings with whom Josie and Lilly interact are all different forms of the Skriker.  Thus the play essentially has only three characters – Josie, Lily and the Skriker.

Pagett knows this as his cast list shows by marking down nine members of the cast both as whatever being or object they play and as “The Skriker”.  The difficulty that Pagett faces like others before him is how to show that the Skriker is transforming herself into these other characters.  Pagett’s approach is fascinating but ultimately does not solve the problem. 

His concept is to give an already confusing text a metatheatrical twist by presenting the play as if it were an entertainment in the underworld for the creatures who inhabit it.  Holly Lloyd has decorated the entire acting space and parts of the seating area of the The Storefront Theatre as a kind of fairyland made out of junk.  Discarded items of all kinds have been artfully piled up and arranged to remind us of trees and banks of flowers while at the same time looking like the detritus they are.  This is eminently suitable both for a fairy world that humans no longer believe in and for the habitat of nature where these beings once lived but that man has destroyed. 

Audience members gathered in the theatre lobby are led in groups into the strange world by the Spriggan (Karen Knox).  Across the back wall of the acting space are two red curtains as if salvaged from a theatre.  The Skriker who has been asleep on the floor is eventually awakened by an assembly of the fantastic creatures to perform.  Clad as she is by Kendra Terpenning in a bowler hat and black jacket, she looks less like a supernatural being than a decrepit master of ceremonies. 

To reinforce the theatrical metaphor, Pagett could have had the Skriker present throughout to introduce each scene, but he doesn’t do this.  Instead, he has us follow the two girls’ adventures unaided as they meet in turn each of the supernatural beings who each have taken on human form.  We know they are supernatural because of distressed clothing and gothlike makeup they wear.  Josie can see what they are because she is mad.  Lily has to distrust what she sees. 

The problem with this approach is that, without glancing at the programme (which will still confuse anyone who doesn’t already know the play) the audience will most likely think it is a series of separate creatures who are tempting or annoying the two girls rather than that all these false humans are really the Skriker.  The impression Pagett’s approach gives is that not just the Skriker is seeking revenge upon her chosen targets but that the whole supernatural realm is against them.  On the one hand, this approach makes the world the girls inhabit frightening and distorted since nothing is really what it seems.  On the other hand, suggesting that the whole supernatural world is opposed to the girls obscures the already hard-to-discern narrative thread of one supernatural creature seeking revenge on two human beings.  When this aspect is emphasized the action has greater tension since we can see more clearly how the Skriker uses ploy after ploy to attain her goal of stealing Lily’s firstborn baby.  In fact, when seen from this point of view, it is likely that the Skriker may previously have taken Josie’s child.

Suzette McCanny gives a powerful performance as Josie.  She plays Josie’s deep depression in such a way that it can be seen both as postpartum depression and as the madness of someone who experiences the otherworld all around us.  In a terrific scene, Lily wishes that Josie were not mad, whereupon McCanny instantly switches into an excess of grief for her dead baby. The sight is so painful that Lily quickly wishes Josie mad again.  From this we see through the precision of McCanny’s acting how madness actually provides Josie with comfort since she can locate her feelings of guilt on the “other” rather than in herself. 

Perrie Olthuis is well cast as the innocent who tries to find her way in this weird world.  While we are happy to have at least one “normal” character to follow through the action, we are constantly fearful that she will fall into one of the many traps the Skriker sets for her.  In what is probably the most comic scene in the play, Lily meets an American woman (Sam Coyle) in a bar who drunkenly insists that Lily explain to her how a television works.  The humour that Olthuis captures so well is that Lily, like any ordinary person, doesn’t really know how it works.  Churchill’s point, of course, is that we live in a world where things might as well run by magic.  In a parallel scene later on, Lily becomes attracted to a young man (Luke Marty), who seems normal enough until he asks Lily to explain what sleep is and how people go to sleep.  Olthuis comically shows how difficult it is to describe such a common phenomenon, while Marty subtly shifts his character from appearing safe to dangerous. 

There are many other standouts.  Elise Beauman as the Little Girl who appeals to Lily for food and a home expertly walks the thin line between neediness and creepiness.  John Fleming in a brief appearance as a Brownie, shows that he has mastered skriker-speak just as well as Armstrong.  Andy Trithardt deserves praise for creating live the otherworldly score.  And Jakob Ehman earns admiration for his energy and invention in playing The Passerby, a human character who silently dances throughout most of the play’s 90 minutes. 

The play will always be unusual among Churchill’s works because, as an ecological parable, it uses such overly elaborate means to tell such a relatively straightforward story.  Though Pagett’s notion of adding a theatrical metaphor only makes a difficult play more difficult, his ability to draw committed performances from the entire cast shows that The Skriker is not the “impossible” play that some critics make it out to be.  Indeed, now that supernatural content has become so widespread in popular media, it may be that we are more prepared to accept and understand the play than were audiences in 1994.  The Red One Theatre Collective deserves our thanks for daring to take on such a profound and complex play and to show how well it blooms on stage.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) Tim Walker, Perrie Olthuis, Suzette McCanney and, Claire Armstrong; Claire Armstrong as The Skriker. ©2014 Zaiden.

For tickets, visit www.redonetheatre.com.