'Consumed' review — four generations of women assemble for this fiery, feral family showdown

Read our review of Karis Kelly's award-winning play Consumed, now in performances at the Park Theatre to 18 April.

Summary

• Karis Kelly’s award-winning play Consumed comes to the Park Theatre
• The bold piece brings together four generations of women in Northern Ireland
• The cast give convincingly lived-in performances in Katie Posner's feral production
• Standouts include Julia Dearden and Andrea Irvine

The political and the personal conjoin in fiery fashion in Karis Kelly’s Consumed, a 2022 winner of the Women’s Prize for Playwriting which anatomises four generations of women brought together for – what else? – a birthday.

The celebrant in this instant is the newly 90-year-old Eileen (Julia Dearden), a sweary, shrewd old bat with opinions on everything from soup (“too wet”) to appropriate language – the second of which is a bit rich given her, um, unbridled way with words. It won’t surprise anyone to discover that the commingling isn’t exactly rife with good cheer, with one or another character lacing into another as they lay bare wounds that turn out to be inseparable from the location – Northern Ireland, with its own history of violence – where the 75-minute play is set.

Kelly’s play has toured the UK (an Edinburgh Festival stint included) in Katie Posner’s feral production. And it certainly feels lived-in by its cast, who accommodate the sometimes lightning-fast changes in mood en route to a sepulchral ending that is accompanied by a storm gathering outside to complement the one that has been swirling indoors.

I’m the first to be on guard against expletive-prone geriatrics, a shopworn device that tends to wear out its welcome fast. So it’s to the credit of Kelly’s writing, and Dearden’s expert star turn as the alternately malign and majestic matriarch, that Eileen rules the play, as she does her family.

One minute, she’s querying whether the word “gluten” might in fact be German; the next she’s proffering observations on her coccyx that might seem bizarre spoken by someone a third her age. In fact, the younger members of the family have their own obsessions and issues, too, starting with misbehaving men and extending to a hyper-pickiness about food – and an over-fondness for drink. Andrea Irvine is particularly spot-on as Eileen’s 65-year-old daughter Gilly, a fusspot who likes to lower her voice before going in for the verbal kill.

Gilly and Eileen’s shared home comes with skeletons in the cupboard – to reveal more would be unfair – and with a shared toxicity that puts one in mind immediately of the mother-daughter dynamic in The Beauty Queen of Leenane. There’s more than a hint of Martin McDonagh to Kelly’s prevailing tone, which deliberately favours the brutish and the blunt: to request nuance from this play would be entirely to miss its point. (A scene of parental force-feeding could have come directly from the earlier play.)

I only wish the transitions in the writing from the quotidian to the more far-reaching – “war,” we’re quite reasonably told, “turns us all into beasts” – weren’t quite so bald-faced. And you soon become aware that the two older women are more interesting and better developed than their younger progeny. Caoimhe Farren’s granddaughter Jenny is like a coiled spring, reacting suspiciously to a ringing phone and seeking respite in a hefty glass or two of red wine.

Jenny, for her part, has arrived home from London, alongside her teenage daughter Muireann (played by an actress of the same name, Muireann Ní Fhaogáin), whom Eileen insists on calling Marie. (“I knew you’d do this,” is the 14-year-old’s weary reaction to what presumably is a familiar, and deliberate, error.)

Lily Arnold’s set springs its own surprises as the writing moves away from naturalism to something eerier and more savage. Let’s just say that the stage floor is revealed as part of a revelation-packed ending that may contain the song “Happy Birthday” even as the play that contains it alights on life’s abiding horrors.

Consumed is at the Park Theatre to 18 April. Book Consumed tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Consumed (Photos by Helen Murray)