Consumed – soup is taken while intergenerational trauma comes back to bite four generations of women (Lyric Theatre until Sunday 8 March, then Park Theatre in London)

Do we pass on trauma from the Troubles and even as far back as the Irish Famine from one generation to the next as easily as we learn to repeat the poor patterns of our parents’ behaviour? Consumed watches what happens when Jenny (Caoimhe Farren) and 14-year-old Muireann (Muireann Ní Fhaogáin) fly over from London to celebrate Great Granny’s 90th birthday. They find that matriarchal Eileen (Julia Dearden) hears more than her speaking-slowly-and-loudly-while-flapping-around daughter Gilly (Andrea Irvine) will acknowledge.

Between each generation of this family lies a series of secrets whose concealment has been rehearsed. Blame is always directed upwards and never towards the men in their lives. But it’s the very absence of men, together with the almost unfiltered connection between Great Granny Eileen’s mind and her mouth, nags away at the veneer that all is well, digging up surprises from the present and the past. And that’s before Eileen dives down the rabbit hole of identity and delivers one of the biggest laughs of the evening (ahead of a couple of much more sobering revelations).

By extending the more common three generation family tree to four, playwright Karis Kelly cleverly allows the audience to glimpse a much broader view through the window of history. With three generations of women failing to own and address the trauma they are carrying, is the 14-year-old neurodivergent ‘English’ girl the best equipped of the four to draw a line in the sand and lead the family out of their dark exile?

Lily Arnold’s set uses a peculiar perspective to explode the kitchen while retaining a view of a hall cupboard and a rising staircase. An archway – so large it shouts out that it is a proscenium arch – suggests that great drama is afoot. Guy Hoare’s flickering lights on top of Beth Duke’s unnerving sound design drop heavy hints – a little too unsubtly for my liking – that proceedings will take a darker and more psychologically-raw and yet also physical twist before the conclusion when the family can no longer keep their secrets buried.

Dearden’s Eileen knows which side of the border she wants to live on. She’s sweary and direct, in sharp contrast with Irvine’s fussy Gilly who incessantly tidies the kitchen table while forgetting that there’s a steaming pot on the stove that may be beyond rescue. Farren plays Caoimhe as a woman who escaped her ‘melt’ of a mother (who believes hairy legs need must be covered) and Northern Ireland for London but has kept her Irish roots and many of its vices.

Muireann is penned as a young woman who is overwhelmed by issues of climate, agriculture, food and wellbeing. We watch her address her anxieties by pushing her chair further and further away from the rest of the family, one time escaping upstairs and another hiding under the table. And when the pressure can no longer be contained, Ní Fhaogáin (making her assured professional debut) allows Muireann’s valve to blow, exploding with articulate and passionate arguments that nearly always fall on the deaf ears of the rest of her family. But if they could only listen to this troubled soul, they might learn to address their own demons.

Director Katie Posner keeps things moving over the 80-minute one-act performance. Soup is heated, spilt, and scoffed. The darkness of Kelly’s award-winning script – together with lashings of local idiom and sensibility – feed into waves of belly laughs with Belfast audiences finding no cow too sacred to become amusing. I can’t help wondering how many references (like the nuance of Ballyholme vs Bangor) will have flown over the heads of London, Sheffield, Coventry and Edinburgh audiences for whom the references are abstract rather than woven into the fabric of life?

The fact that Karis Kelly’s finely tuned script which won the Women’s Prize for Playwriting back in 2022 (while writer-in-residence at the Lyric) is only making it to a stage in Belfast in 2026 speaks of both the lack of opportunity to mount new work and the slow speed of staging work that does make it onto the production conveyor belt.

Consumed continues its run in the Lyric Theatre, Belfast until 8 March before transferring to Park Theatre in London (18 March–18 April) in a remount presented by Paines Plough, Park Theatre and the Lyric Belfast.

Photo credit: Pamela Raith Photography

Appreciated this review? Why not click on the Buy Me a Tea button!