The Skriker
Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester
4/5

TWO years ago, one of the highlights of the Manchester International Festival was the magnificent staging of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy, a homage to those killed in the Peterloo Massacre.

This year’s festival sees the creative team behind that success reunited in a revival of Caryl Churchill’s complex, disturbing and dystopian play The Skriker, with director Sarah Frankcom and actor Maxine Peake recreating the writer’s astonishing and frightening vision.

It’s fired with anger and frustration at a world growing ever more unequal as greed and selfishness propel the planet towards inevitable destruction.

That vision lies somewhere between James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and Dante’s Inferno, as imagined through the paintings of the renaissance artist Luca Signorelli, and it opens with an extraordinary 25-minute monologue from The Skriker (Peake), a tortured ancient spirit.

She’s a shapeshifter who can transmute into anything — an old lady, a small child and even objects — whose babbling and disjointed words weave a poisonous spell over a crumbling world.

As the ear becomes attuned to her Joycean gibberish, the realisation dawns that she is the harbinger of the world’s annihilation.

The scene switches to a mental hospital where Josie (Laura Elsworthy) is incarcerated for killing her 10-week-old baby.

Visited by her friend Lily (Juma Sharkah), herself heavily pregnant, Josie becomes aware of the Skriker’s malevolent presence and her desire to possess both girls. Like Dante’s spiral into hell, The Skriker leads them into an inferno from where there will be no return.

Peake is an astonishing shapeshifter of an actor. In a mind-blowing performance, she slithers, slides and insinuates herself into the very fabric of the stage’s dark and portentous space. One minute friendly and even kindly, the next she’s menacing, sinister and terrifying.

The unsettling atmosphere is compounded by Lizzie Clachan’s set — a cross between a bear pit and a Leipzig beer cellar during the nazi period.

This production is not an easy watch. Played straight through without an interval, there’s no respite from the Skriker’s vengeful world.

But it is an important play and despite its complex style and difficult language, the message is simple. Today’s unfettered global capitalism will destroy our planet.

To avoid this armageddon we need to act now — and the clock is ticking.

Runs until August 1, box office: royalexchange.co.uk