Skip to main content

Consumed

Traverse Theatre

Four stars

 

Happy days are here again for Eileen in Karis Kelly’s new play, set in a contemporary Northern Ireland simmering with recent history. Eileen is celebrating her 90th birthday, and all four generations of the family she sired will be gathering around the kitchen table to celebrate. Or at least he women will, anyway. There’s Eileen’s own daughter Jenny, who keeps house and pretty much everything besides as she hoards up the past. Then there’s Jenny’s daughter Gilly, who’s just arrived from London with her teenage offspring Muireann. Muireann rejects her Irish name, and has no sense of history before five minutes ago.

 

Whether Eileen has always been a potty-mouthed harridan who will pick a fight with anyone or whether it’s come with age isn’t clear. Either way, it sets the tone for a vicious four-way sparring in the first half of the play as the women reacquaint themselves with unsettled scores while they prepare the birthday dinner. 

 

Julia Dearden plays Eileen with an unfiltered ferocity that suggests she knows where the bodies are buried. Caoimhe Farren’s Jenny is a classic Irish matriarch, but she too has volatility about her when challenged by outside forces. Andrea Irvine’s Gilly may have escaped her geographical confines, but exile brings its own problems, as Muireann Ní Fhaogáin captures the juvenile idealism of fourteen-year-old Muireann,  

 

What initially appears to be a scabrous domestic battlefield steeped in hand-me-down resentment as the sins of the mothers come to the surface is entertaining enough in Katie Posner’s production, a collaboration between Paines Plough, Belgrade Theatre Coventry, Sheffield Theatres and Women’s Prize for Playwriting in association with Lyric Theatre Belfast. 

 

As tempers fray on Lily Arnold’s classic kitchen set, the truth of the absence of the men in the family leads to a dramatic and stylistic explosion. The play’s shattering conclusion unearths everything beyond with seismic results in a daring evocation of the psychological damage that lingers from the barely suppressed history of the Troubles continues to leave its mark. 

 

Until August 24, various times


The Herald, August 5th 2025

 

Ends 

 

 

 

 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Billy Elliot The Musical

Edinburgh Playhouse Five stars A big National Coal Board sign looms large at the opening of Lee Hall and Elton John's decade-old musical stage version of Hall and director Stephen Daldry's hit turn of the century film. In a tale of one little boy's liberation as a dancer against the backdrop of the 1980s miners strike, however, the Durham Miners banner and the 'Save Our Community' sash held aloft matter more. It is this call to arms that forms the heart of Daldry's production, as Billy becomes a potty-mouthed beacon of hope in a situation where picket line, thin blue line and chorus line rub uneasily up against each other. Given such a context, there is bound to be some pretty grown-up stuff going on here, be it the institutionalised homophobia in Billy's village, the class war going on within it, or Billy's grieving for his dead mother that drives his every move. And, as so magnificently choreographed by Peter Darling, what moves they are. Watch...
Post a Comment
Read more

Myra Mcfadyen - An Obituary

Myra McFadyen – Actress   Born January 12th 1956; died October 18th 2024   Myra McFadyen, who has died aged 68, was an actress who brought a mercurial mix of lightness and depth to her work on stage and screen. Playwright and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, David Greig, called McFadyen “an utterly transformative, shamanic actor who could change a room and command an audience with a blink”. Citizens’ Theatre artistic director Dominic Hill described McFadyen’s portrayal of Puck in his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London as “funny, mischievous and ultimately heartbreaking.”   For many, McFadyen will be most recognisable from Mamma Mia!, the smash hit musical based around ABBA songs. McFadyen spent two years on the West End in Phyllida Lloyd’s original 1999 stage production, and was in both film offshoots. Other big screen turns included Rob Roy (1995) and Our Ladies (2019), both directed by Mi...
1 comment
Read more

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more