SOURCE: Norden, Barbara. “When the Kelpie Rides and the Spriggan Stalks.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4740 (4 February 1994): 18.

In the following review, Norden praises Churchill's imagination and dialogue in The Skriker but finds the staging disappointing and at times distracting.

Even in her apparently most naturalistic work, staged at the Royal Court throughout the 1970s and 80s, Caryl Churchill has had the ability to startle audiences. In Serious Money, she pushed the emotional temperature up to create the sense of frenzy of City dealing rooms. In Top Girls, she had a 1980s career woman sitting down to dinner with an array of women from history.

But as The Skriker, her latest play and the first to be produced at the National Theatre, opens—with a wordless roar and rocks hurled against bare white walls—we know we are into something different. The play integrates two worlds. On the one hand...