REVIEW: The Skriker at Newcastle Theatre Royal

The Skriker 

by Caryl Churchill

Newcastle Theatre Royal Studio

Until Friday 11 July 2025

Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker is a chilling, poetic fever dream that lingers in the mind long after the final scene fades. Fusing myth, folklore, and raw social commentary, Churchill crafts a shape-shifting theatrical experience that is both timeless and alarmingly relevant.

Now in its 10th anniversary year, Project A is Newcastle Theatre Royal’s professional actor training programme. This production represents this year’s students final major production in the newly refurbished Studio Theatre. Thus it was a chance to see the next generation of talent in action at the start of their careers.

The titular character — the Skriker (co performed by Arwen Jenkins, Jo Jo Appleton, Eden Fuller & Isla Burns), a malevolent, otherworldly being from British folklore — is a mesmerizing tour de force. Speaking in fractured, pun-laced Edward Leer-esque poetry, the creature stalks and manipulates two vulnerable young women, Josie (Aimee Cernik) and Lily (Skyla Pearce), whose lives are already unravelling due to trauma, loss, and alienation. The Skriker's language is not only disorienting but oddly beautiful — a dark music that demands the audience listen with more than just their ears

What makes The Skriker so powerful is its ability to operate on multiple levels at once: a haunting fairy tale, a psychological drama, and a pointed critique of environmental and societal collapse. Churchill’s exploration of mental illness, ecological destruction, and the fragility of identity is as urgent today as when the play first premiered in the 1994.

This production delivers on Churchill’s vision with visual flair and emotional depth. The staging is dreamlike — part nightmare, part grotesque carnival — with seamless transitions between reality and the supernatural. Clever use of sound and light evoke an eerie underworld just beneath our feet, with the cast often playing instruments themselves. Costume and set design, often surreal and fragmented, underscore the play’s otherworldliness while reinforcing its themes of decay and transformation.

The performances are uniformly strong. The four actors portraying the Skriker is particularly arresting, shifting between menace and seduction with uncanny ease whilst coping with the complex word play. Meanwhile, the Cernik and Pearce, playing the central characters of Josie and Lily, bring heartbreaking vulnerability to roles that could easily be swallowed by the play’s mythic scale. Their performances ground the story in something painfully real.

The Skriker is not an easy play, nor is it meant to be. But for those willing to surrender to its surreal staging, strange rhythms and embrace its ambiguity, it offers a richly layered and unforgettable experience. Churchill’s play reminds us that the most terrifying monsters are not always the ones that lurk in the shadows — they may live inside us, born of the damage we inflict on each other and the world around us.

In the end, The Skriker is part a brave, visionary piece of theatre: strange, stunning, entirely unique and partly bat-shit crazy.

Review & photos: Stephen Oliver

Tickets: https://www.theatreroyal.co.uk/whats-on/the-skriker/