Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Low Down
Four generations of a family assemble for Eileen’s 90th birthday celebration. But it appears no one really wants to be there and everyone is skirting round things that can’t be said. Karis Kelly’s award winning play, Consumed, sets off at a run, fiercely funny and disturbing gradually descending into something altogether darker.
Review
Four generations of Northern Irish women come together to celebrate the 90th birthday of matriarch, Eileen (Julia Dearden). None of them seem to want to be there, all of them are tiptoeing around, treading on eggshells and averting difficult conversations before they begin.
Paines Plough’s production of Karis Kelly’s Women’s Prize for Playwriting winning play, Consumed, opens in a naturalistic domestic setting, around a kitchen table. Gilly (Andrea Irvine) returns from shopping for the forthcoming birthday party to an ingrained tetchy exchange with her mother, the belligerent and increasingly foul-mouthed, Eileen. Into this picture of domestic discord, enter Gilly’s daughter, Jenny (Caoimhe Farren) and her daughter, Muireann (Muireann Ní Fhaogáin) who have flown in from London to join the party. Four different generations of Northern Irish women reunited under one roof, women who have lived through very different parts of Northern Irish history and have very different relationships with it.
Initially, the dialogue flows fast and fiercely funny with an Enda Walsh meets Mrs. Brown’s Boys feel to the set up. While talk is easy, conversation is more difficult with every topic that is broached being shut down by one of the women. There are obviously secrets in this dysfunctional family and skeletons in their cupboards. Eileen sits proud at the head of the table, waiting for the party to come to her and occasionally lashing out some invective at one of her family. Gilly meanwhile is determined to be the domestic goddess and play happy families even if that means sticking her fingers in her ears and going la la la la. Her daughter, Jenny long ago said good riddance to the place and left for London. Muireann, the great grand daughter, the grand-daughter, the daughter, is the only one born outside of Northern Ireland, a Gen Z native who’s vegan and environmentalist. Gradually the resentments play out though the secrets remain hidden. The men are absent and the questions as to their whereabouts are repeated again and again without answer. So far, so naturalistic, so funny and so increasingly anarchic as the illusion of happy families begins to disintegrate.
But where the production falters is as it moves from the naturalistic to the surreal. As the reveals happen and the skeletons tumble out of the cupboard, the play takes an increasingly dark turn. While the change in form is warranted by its subject-matter, the sudden leap doesn’t carry us with it – the shift is too great in both action and character. At this point the story is not entirely clear and sadly not totally audible.
It is making important points about the dangers of repressing and internalising trauma, about intergenerational trauma and the effect that this continues to have on Northern Irish women. There’s a fine play here that is highly entertaining and then falters as it opens up and fails to deliver in full. Nonetheless, it’s a good play with a barrel full of laughs along the way.
Consumed is a co-production between Paines Plough, Belgrade Theatre, Sheffield Theatres and the Women’s Prize for Playwriting,, in association with the Lyric Theatre Belfast.
