Bringing the Global Home: The Commitment of Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker

Abstract

Caryl Churchill’s play The Skriker explores the ravages and intoxications of globalization. Through the shape-shifting character of the Skriker, who commands space and time in a manner that recalls the fluidity of multinational capital, Churchill examines the relationship between time–space compression and the fragmented subjectivities of two young women, Josie and Lily. In this essay, I argue that, through the play’s formal exploration of the decentring forces of postmodern life, Churchill is able to demystify her subjects’ relations to the flows of multinational capital and, in doing so, to recover the affect that the pressure of time–space compression threatens to exhaust.