EdFringe Review: Consumed

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Karis Kelly’s ‘Consumed’, winner of the Women’s Prize for Playwrighting 2022, is quite the ferocious study in generational trauma, and the all too common cycle of female rivalry. Directed with a fearless hand by Katie Posner, it opens on Ulster-Scots matriarch Eileen’s (Julia Dearden) 90th birthday.

It’s her “special day” and her grey-haired daughter Gilly (Andrea Irvine) has the dubious honour of catering the event at the family home. There are only three party hats, and Gilly isn’t getting, because they’re for “real guests.”

Well, the only guests who turn up are Gilly’s middle-aged daughter, Jenny (Caoimhe Farren) and her teenage daughter Muireann (Muireann Ní Fhaogáin). Calamity is written on the wall from the start, detectable in Gilly’s rictus smile and forced cheer, despite her elderly mother’s constant jibes. The house, lovingly designed by Lily Arnold, looks pretty grand for a typical Northern Irish homestead, but there’s no missing the messiness. It’s not dirty, just cluttered, with bags for life everywhere, and piles of biscuits and other bits on the surfaces.

It’s not a happy home, and Gilly’s husband, and Jenny’s beloved daddy is notable by his absence. Catholic-hating Eileen castigates her daughter as a feckless busybody; Gilly guilts her own daughter in a million different ways; in rebellion, Jenny new-age parents her daughter to distraction; Muireann feels almost entirely unloved. All have an unhealthy obsession with calories in one way or another, their bodies consumed by trauma and leaving no space for food.

Suffice it to say all four actors give bravura performances, and share a toxic chemistry which lends complete authenticity to their dealings with one another.

There’s oodles of black, and blacker comedy threaded through this long day’s journey into cathartic disaster, though most of the 90-year-olds viciously well-timed barbs made me wince, not laugh. The intergenerational tension does produce some lighter moments, particularly as Great Granny and Great Granddaughter struggle to make sense of one another, but the sense of escalating threat first dampens, then extinguishes it.

We all know that Jenny’s constant demands to know “where Daddy is” are driving her mum right to the edge. When Jenny reveals her own marital problems, it’s immediately seized upon, partly as distraction, partly just to say “I told you so.” There’s literally no love lost between anyone on stage; they have survived each other, that’s the best we can say.

Playwright Kelly never lets the evening lose its catastrophic moment, tortured secrets tumbling out from mouths and cupboards one atop another. Lighting Designer Guy Hoare and Sound Designer/Composer, Beth Duke’s horror-tinged contributions only heighten the sense of approaching doom.

Once the ultimately terrible crisis springs like the jaws of a mousetrap snapping shut, it’s left to the youngest generation to try to usher in something new and less cursed for their lineage. It’s now that the sparks of new ideas, which have begun to flow from youngest to oldest throughout, catch fire.

The final moments are unquestionably momentous and arresting, but – perhaps – lean a little too far into the abstract for a play so firmly rooted in everyday misery. Kelly’s ultimate thesis of a ‘Troubles’ tormented generation visiting the sins of their forebears on the next, and the next, on the other hand, rings entirely true.

Concise, powerful and memorable, ‘Consumed’ marks Karis Kelly as a writer with a sharp eye and a promising future.

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