The Skriker Actor Packet

!Above: Air pollution hangs over the city of London."
A Damaged
Great
Britain ...
“I was certainly wanting to write a play about damage !! damage to nature and damag"
to people, both which there’s plenty of about. To that extent, I was writing a play abou#
England now.” ~Caryl Churchi$, 1994
Just as the Crone is the embodiment of the three stages of women, the Skriker
can also be seen as the product of the social and ecological damage humans
have inflicted upon the world and, in the case of the play, Britain specifically.
Churchill wrote the Skriker during the 1980s and 1990s which were a
complicated and tumultuous time in Great Britain. The government and the
citizens faced economic, political, and environmental changes and damages. In
1979, Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of England. The country’s
economy had been failing, and she made it her mission to reverse that decline.
She sought for England to regain status and influence in international a#airs.
Thatcher’s policies supported privately owned mega$companies, threatening
small businesses. She also increased taxes !during and economic recession" to
decrease inflation. While this worked, the unemployment rate sky$rocketed.
By 1982, over 3 million people in Britain were unemployed.
This was also the time when conflict between Catholics and Protestants in
Northern Ireland was spilling into England and the rest of Great Britain.
England had troops stationed in Northern Ireland, but su#ered attacks in their
own territory as well. For example, The Provisional Irish Republican Army
bombed the Brighton Hotel on October 12, 1984, killing five, though their
attempt on Margaret Thatcher’s life was not successful !New World
Encyclopedia".