Consumed review – Karis Kelly’s award-winning play has its stage premiere

The battlefield of the family dinner table takes on new resonance in Karis Kelly’s Consumed, winner of the Women’s Prize for Playwriting in 2022, getting its belated premiere here.

The vibrance and dark viscosity of Kelly’s writing allows this dark comedy about a misbegotten birthday party to tip into a grand guignol study of pain and trauma without ever losing its grip. It begins with flashing lights and ominous rumbles that shake Lily Arnold’s naturalistic kitchen set and ends in chaos and debris, always true to its own bold spirit.

The ostensible cause for celebration is the 90^th birthday of vicious matriarch Eileen (Julia Dearden), who is saving the party hats for her “real” guests, while subjecting her harassed daughter Gilly to a barrage of vitriol. But it is clear from the very start that something is badly wrong. Gilly’s genteel manner and caring veneer, beautifully caught by Andrea Irvine, mask nervousness and obsession. She jumps every time the phone rings and is evasive about the whereabouts of her husband.

When her daughter Jenny (Caoimhe Farren) and grand-daughter Muireann (Muireann Ní Fhaogáin) arrive at the Northern Irish family home from England, where they are settled, concealing their own secrets and lies, the scene is set for a massive explosion.

Kelly’s writing is consistently sharp and incredibly funny. The gaps between the generations are caught by Eileen’s supposed inability to understand anything her vegan, English great-granddaughter is saying to her. “It’s hard enough trying to decipher your accent without you speaking in tongues,” she barks, with ill-concealed relish.

But as the arguments escalate from whether Jenny should shave her legs, to how to deal with a case of disordered eating, it becomes obvious that Kelly is concerned with deeper issues. When the skeletons almost literally start to tumble out of the closet, it’s clear that the violent history of the Troubles and Northern Ireland have a role to play in what seems initially like a domestic drama of incompatibility. Even the carrot and coriander soup suddenly takes on dark significance.

All the older women are in some way in thrall to men and to a past that has been long buried and never discussed. It has distorted their own hold on the present – and it risks being handed down to Muireann who alone is willing to defy destiny and face the truth.

Consumed isn’t perfect. Director Katie Posner pitches it high and loud from the very beginning when it might have been better to let its tensions grow. The revelation of Muireann’s eating disorder, though beautifully expressed in a speech where she talks about feeling both full up and ravenously hungry, arrives late and is under-explored.

But the performances are all first-rate, absolutely true to the uncompromising vision and fierce originality of Kelly’s script. It holds the attention every second. I loved it.