The Skriker, Royal Exchange, 1st July – 1st August 2015
Firstofall:imaginewordssoclosetogetherthatyoucan’talwaystellthemapart. You’re in the Royal Exchange, a space transformed, adorned, made out, played out like a Siberian fighting pit, your humble bumble of a reviewer one floor up looking down on a lot of anxious, middle-class people sat at benches wondering, perhaps, what they have let themselves in for. A group of shaking zombie souls shudder and judder, actors and dancers among the nervy civilians. Maxine Peake Puck Pooka – a shaven maven – is spewing staccato poetry words, sounds ricocheting from her mouth, hopping like a frog or a dog or the Balrog from table to table. The speed of delivery, the tintinnabulating echolalia (la-la-la), itself a song threaded with repetitions and riffs and puns spun bundled in packages up into the darkened rafters, gets a bit much. What is going on what is going wrong going on and on. Thankfully, there’s a break. The Skriker, for Peake is she, exi(s)ts, and two young women – Josie and Lily (played by Laura Elsworthy and Juma Sharkah, respectively, the latter making her debut at the Royal Exchange and what a debut it is – Sharkah is an actress to watch) appear and talk, as people do. The audience, especially the people gathered in the pit, as much a part of the action as the actors themselves, breathe relieved, their hearts on their sleeves. Josie is asking heavily pregnant Lily for help. She wants Lily to get her out. We figure she’s in a home or an institution. There’s someone in there with her, someone who she thinks is hundreds of years old. When Lily leaves, Peake returns (talking in that curious hybrid of Mark E Smith and Lawrence Olivier in Richard III mode) and a wish is made: Josie says take Lily instead of me. The scene shifts. Lily on a street, pestered by an old lady in a fur coat wrapped in carrier bags. There is a cuddle and a kiss. The scene shifts. Josie is out. She and Lily are together, Lily wrapped up in Peake, Peake with distorted angel wings, the two girls wishing and fishing, Peake in view and out of sight. This sets the template for much of what follows, the Skriker chasing first one and then the other of the girls, wanting something, a dumpling, a dumb thing, ring a ding ding. Periodically we return to Peake alone, the Skriker spewing and spitting and chewing the scenery, rat-a-tat-tatting clinking links, the words as clear as day, the sense sometimes elusive, a playful push-pull, the play an anemone, pulsing between Beckett monologue and more common fair, the sense – of where we are and when we are and what it is that we are actually watching – not always clear and yet somehow brilliant in its confusion. Peake is an old lady, an American sophisticate, a sort of chavvy child in a hood, a Queen of the Underworld (Peake channelling her inner Miranda Richardson as Queenie in Slackbladder Crackchatter Blackadder – the gobbledygook is infectious), a young man with romantic intentions and possibly a baby. There is a dancer, the kind of guy you would’ve seen in the Hacienda in 1986, throwing spastic shapes in an idiot trance, an in media res Bez; and others, a professional lady in a smart suit, simulating sex, possibly, with a bearded man who wears her shoes on his hands, the two of them like some weird beast with two backs. There is a choir, there are solo singers, Nico Muhly and Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons) fashioning beguiling and wonderful sounds, which themselves offer comfort when the sights are themselves dissonant and ugly. At times, we blunder wonder if we’ve wandered into another offkey adaptation of Midsummer Night’s Dream, a retelling awash with Pucks. Later or earlier, as the audience is escorted to the edges of the floor by a strange bald man with a huge ear on the very top of his head, among others (The Skriker has a good size cast) and a body is seemingly served up on platters to a gaggle of revellers, the owner of said body lamenting as Josie – oh look we think, there’s Josie, the play waves at its narrative from across the room – is tempted to drink from a glass of what looks like wine, urged in a dirge to join them join them join them join them. We are in Peter Greenaway country and credit must be extended to designer Lizzie Clachan and choreographer Imogen Knight because even when we’ve stopped making sense there are beautiful magpie sights and mesmerising movements to sweep you up in the deep crossbar leaps. Toto, we’re not in wherever we thought we were any more. Amidst the cacophony, there are great lines, great snatches of sense, great performances, even as part of you scrambles for coherence among the scrambled eggs. And still (although of course she is never still) there is Peake, the Skriker, moving like smoke, begging and pleading and cajoling, smarmy and worldlywise and childlike, beautiful and strange, an actress you can take your eyes off, tense and predatory, one minute hunched coughing, the next seemingly desperate, the next joyous as a sprung trap. Is she faking, is she real, does she care, could we not be expected to understand the kaleidoscopic clockworks of a creature like the Skriker? Impossible to say. This is a play firmly (infirmly) in the world of both/and. Whatever you think, think its opposite. Too much time passes and not enough; infuriated, looking at your watch, sometimes wanting it to be over, you wonder if it would be possible to somehow get another ticket and watch it again, knowing that its place within the Manchester Indigestion Festival probably guarantees a glancing glimpse and no more. Harking back to director Sarah Frankcom’s previous collaboration with Peake on Hamlet, The Skriker is a play of infinite jest and excellent fancy – and, to continue the riff and labour the point much as The Skriker occasionally does, like Infinite Jest’s own entertainment, the film so interesting its viewers watch and rewatch until they die, this is a play you could watch again and again until it kills you. But you might die with a smile frozen on your face.
Peter Wild