Coventry’s Belgrade Theatre has embarked on its third co-production with acclaimed theatre company Paines Plough. Their latest offering, also co-produced with Sheffield Theatres and the Lyric Belfast, is Consumed. The play, written by Karis Kelly, won the Women’s Prize for Playwriting - it digs deep into the nature of inherited trauma, in turns harrowing and bitterly funny.

Four generations of women gather for the eldest’s 90th birthday - each bearing their own baggage, along with their unique, and visibly unhealthy, coping mechanisms. The mothers and daughters chafe against each other like sandpaper, calling out each other's failings, while subconsciously revealing how similar they really are. The grandmothers and their granddaughters show affection at first, but are also scathing towards each other’s behaviour. 

The spectre haunting them is traced back beyond the claustrophobic family circle, into the inherited traumas of Irish and Northern Irish history. Kelly’s script links the family’s violence back to the Troubles, and their disordered attitude towards food to the Famine. Each woman exists in defiance of her family, each generation lives in a twisted reflection of the one before.

Julia Dearden plays Eileen, the 90-year-old matriarch, who swears like a sailor, and resents that attention has been drawn away from her on her ‘special day’. She also rejects the ‘fussing’ of her daughter, Gilly. Andrea Irvine skillfully portrays Gilly’s obsessive need to keep up appearances, and has an infuriating habit of physically turning away from the uncomfortable truths in front of her.

Gilly’s daughter Jenny, played by Caoimhe Farren, returns to her old family home. Like her mother, she attempts to maintain the veneer that she is holding her life together, but as she falls into old patterns, the similarities between Gilly and Jenny become more apparent. Gilly brings her own daughter, Muireann (played by Muireann Ní Fhaogáin) whose accent is decidedly more London than Derry.

Fourteen-year-old Muireann is neurotic and hyper-informed, carrying the weight of her ancestors, while feeling displaced from her ancestral home. The foundations of that home start to shake, and more than one skeleton comes tumbling out of the closet.

The play is short, running at an hour and 15 minutes, and without an interval. Consumed offers a sharp burst of fully realized emotion, and even as deep horror reveals itself we’re allowed to laugh at the funny side, with a glimmer of unsweetened hope. Having been previewed at the Belgrade earlier this year, before a stint in Edinburgh, it’s definitely worth a watch.

Five Stars

Consumed was reviewed on Thursday 4 September by Jessica Clixby at The Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, where it shows until Saturday 6 September