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The Skriker: EN302: European Theatre
The Skriker: EN302: European Theatre
The Skriker: EN302: European Theatre
JOSIE. Toads, what you do that for, I’m not toads inside, it’s you
that’s toads. (28)
• Note that Lily is not, in fact, ultimately rewarded for her kindness.
• Geraldine Cousin: “The Skriker is, finally, not so much a fairy story as
a warning against believing in fairy stories – at least the kind where
everyone lives happily ever after.” (1996: 186)
Fairy tales and the unconscious
• Ralf Erik Remshardt describes the Skriker’s underworld as
“transparently the realm of dreams, fears, and desires” (1995:
122).
• For Elaine Aston, the Skriker and the other spirits “stand for
the damaged semiotic (in the Kristevan sense): the
marginalised ‘other’ that haunts the symbolic order – an
invisible, repressed world, made visible” (2003: 29).
• The Skriker seems to feed on Josie’s dreams and memories:
• This is clearly not an elegy for lost folklore (see Churchill’s Vinegar Tom).
SKRIKER. You people are killing me, do you know that? I am sick, I am
a sick woman. (22)
Environmental damage
JOSIE. And now no one tastes any good?
SKRIKER. Dry as dustpans, foul as shitpandemonium. Poison
in the food chain saw massacre.
JOSIE. If I could just go and see. I’d come back.
SKRIKER. Shall I take you in my pocket pick it up and tuck it
in?
JOSIE. Yes please.
SKRIKER. Up in the smokey hokey pokey? up in the world
wind? up in the war zone ozone zany grey? (37-8)
Environmental damage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxmjrpXXRT4
SKRIKER. Have you noticed the large number of
meteorological phenomena lately? Earthquakes.
Volcanoes. Drought. Apocalyptic meteorological
phenomena. The increase of sickness. It was always
possible to think whatever your personal problem,
there’s always nature. Spring will return, even if it’s
without me. Nobody loves me but at least it’s a sunny
day. This had been a comfort to people as long as
they’ve existed. But it’s not available any more. Sorry.
Nobody loves me and the sun’s going to kill me. Spring
will return and nothing will grow. (48-9)
Environmental damage
SKRIKER. If she was back on earth where on earth where
was the rockabye baby gone the treetop? Lost and gone
for everybody was dead years and tears ago, it was
another cemetery, a black whole hundred yearns. […]
But when the daughters grand and great greater
greatest knew she was from the distant past master
class, then rage raging bullfight bullroar.