Karis Kelly is Consumed by family, politics and family politics in award-winning play

We all remember where we were when the government suggested that a ballerina could retrain as an IT worker.

It was late 2020, and Karis Kelly had just received a long-awaited OCD diagnosis while in her 30s. From then on, the playwright felt inclined to look into the condition, as well as addiction and compulsions. They wrote Consumed, submitted it, just hoping for some feedback, and won the 2022 Women’s Prize for Playwrighting.

Over the run-time, the dark comedy explores those tricky family dynamics, generational trauma, and national identity, as at a 90th birthday party, four generations of Northern Irish women reunite under one roof. “It does degrade into something quite dark and visceral and violent, before going into magical realism,” they tease, “It descends into something a bit explosive.”

Writing to both understand herself and the world, she says: “I knew I was an anxious person and I knew that I would go into anxiety spirals that I couldn’t get out of, but I didn’t know then that it was OCD.” After receiving the diagnosis, which like for many people took a while, she decided to sit down and try to trace where it started.

She noticed a pattern around mental ill health in her parents – a Catholic father and Protestant mother – “and unearthed a lot of research around transgenerational trauma and how these things kind of knit themselves into our DNA and are passed down through generations to generations.”

In 2020, spending on antidepressants in Northern Ireland rose by £7 million, and in the previous year, it was reported that the male suicide rate in Northern Ireland is double that of England. A lot of research points back to the Troubles.

“I describe it as the ‘Hungry Ghost’, which is a term that Gabor Maté uses,” Kelly starts, “It’s the Buddhist story that no matter what’s poured down their throats, they can’t be satiated, and that was where the theme for the play came from.”

Kelly discusses how the play has changed significantly over the past five years. It comes as a response to new research, like the discovery of the starvation gene and its relation to famine, as well as current headlines of devastation.

“When I won the prize, the Ukrainian War had just erupted,” Kelly starts, “And now obviously everything that’s going on with the Middle East… what felt nebulous and quite far away when I wrote the play now feels incredibly close.”

The ending, in particular, has gone through changes: “We decided that in the current world, there needs to be some spark of hope to break these cycles of violence and trauma.” With the cast in rehearsals, she says: “The play has transformed and morphed into something even bigger and better and brilliant.”

Before winning the prize, Kelly was writing for 14 years: “It’s elevated my career in ways I couldn’t have even imagined.” She explains that prizes like that one have in a way replaced literary departments within theatres, “and I think they’re so vital.” With Sheffield Theatres declaring itself home of the Prize, and Paines Plough taking Consumed on a regional tour, the playwright couldn’t be happier that more audiences outside of London will be able to connect with the piece, and hopes to inspire new writers.

Kelly smiles widely while talking about Northern Ireland, it’s as if she misses it. She lives there full-time, but is spending time in Brighton with some friends while the cast (all Irish) rehearse at the London Irish Centre. Consumed is described as a “love letter to Northern Irish women,” they explain, “They’re just the best people in the world. They’re so funny. They’ve been through so much, and yet they’re very revolutionary.”

Speaking about her ancestors, whom she hopes audiences will recognise themselves if they read or watch the piece, she says: “Although the play is dark, and the characters are cruel to each other, I feel a lot of love for them. I also feel a lot of love from my mum and her ancestors because they may have had coping mechanisms that were, you know, not necessarily healthy, but they’ve got me to where I am today.”

Consumed feels as though it’s gearing up to join the ranks as a great modern classic, just like Beth Steel’s Till The Stars Come Down, which observes a family reuniting, or the Eline Arbo-directed production of Annie Ernaux’s The Years, examining a woman’s life through her stories. “I think these stories are emerging because it’s about understanding ourselves, but also understanding our place in the world and our ancestral history,” Kelly adds.

Director Katie Posner is a mother, and struck a chord when she told Kelly: ‘You do everything you possibly can to be different from your parents, but you end up in some way causing trauma that is different.’

In Consumed, the eldest member of the family, Eileen (played by Julia Dearden, who also read the piece as part of Belfast’s International Women’s Day celebrations), is aligned very differently politically to the youngest granddaughter, played by Muireann Ní Fhaogáin.

For Kelly, her play is about being able to hold two truths at once. They see the grey areas, understand that somebody can be both a victim and a perpetrator, and take pride in “holding the centre” – something they are used to from their parents’ mixed marriage.

“In the divisive world that we live in now, I think that’s a really important message that I’d like people to take.”