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Consumed - Comedy gives way to horror in new family drama.

  • Amanda Burden
  • 2 days ago
  • 2 min read
Consumed. Photo credit Rebecca Pitt.
Consumed. Photo credit Rebecca Pitt.

Consumed, coming to the Belgrade Theatre 3 - 6 September. Also reviewed at the B2 Venue 26 July.


You don’t just look like Grandma – you are her: comedy gives way to horror in new family drama.

Rarely does a fact stop you dead in your tracks. But every now and then a piece of trivia is so astonishing that your brain tucks it away, for future pub quiz victories or dinner party repartee. We all know the type – octopuses have three hearts. Bananas are berries. Bob Holness played the saxophone solo on Baker Street.* Not actually true. But repeated as gospel many times.


Consumed, a preview show at the Belgrade Theatre, delivers just one of these nuggets: the fact that baby girls are born with all of the eggs they’ll ever have. Which means a pregnant woman carries not just a baby, but a potential physical trace of her future grandchild. This cellular baton-pass may mean that not only nutrients are passed on, but memory and emotions beat a corporeal path down through generations. The familiar cry of ‘she’s just like her grandma’ takes on a new resonance. Not just like her – but OF her.


This generational imbroglio is the focus of Consumed, a diamond-sharp four-woman play set in a deceptively normal Northern Irish Kitchen. But the prosaic scrubbed pine surfaces and gleaming metro tiles hide dark secrets and even darker trauma. The cosy family kitchen is stuffed with claustrophobic secrets. What begins as a rollicking Mrs Brown’s Boys-esque comedy ends up as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.


We follow four generations of women from the same family. Great grandma Eileen (Julia Dearden), cantankerous and potty-mouthed, hides the suffering endured through the violence of the Troubles behind her brusque exterior. Her daughter Gillian (Andrea Irvine) is a compulsive hoarder whose bulging cupboard doors hide more than clutter. Granddaughter Jennifer (Caoimhe Farren)  is an alcoholic unravelling in drink and marital anguish, while Muirrean (Muireann Ní Fhaogáin), the youngest branch of the family tree, is trapped in a fight against her own body against the backdrop of a world obsessed with image.


Writer Karis Kelly’s dialogue has the fast pace of a world class tennis match, with Dearden delivering lines crackling with vitriol and vulgarity and Ní Fhaogáin  simmering with Gen Z fury and indignation. As the narrative progress, comedy gives way to drama. The kitchen becomes a war-torn battle ground and a stifling prison, oceans of plastic carrier bags erupting like toxic waste, towers of tinned tomatoes standing ominously as a silent army set for action.The cast are professional and accomplished, giving multi-layered and assured performances, backed up with a fast-moving and original script that enables what could be outlandish to appear shockingly believable.


Consumed is not an easy watch, confronting ideas of generational trauma caused by political unrest unflinchingly. It sets out to prove that psychological harm doesn’t die with the individual who experienced it. Rather, it is passed along, like a diabolic game of Chinese whispers, affecting children as yet unborn. Powerful and unsettling.

 


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