Issy Cory
Eileen is celebrating her 90th birthday, and her daughter Gilly wants everything to go exactly how she’s pictured it. Gilly’s daughter and granddaughter, Jenny and Muireann, are visiting from London having left Northern Ireland three years ago. This is a family dinner on steroids.
The atmosphere is thick with tension from the instant the lights come up, with snipes and jibes being made between mothers and daughters after five minutes of being together. As each course is served, the conflict turns darker, secrets are flung out, and we discover that there are more skeletons in the closet than we care to admit.
The headline of this review has to be THE SET ! Lily Arnold, the talent you are. I was sat gleefully close to the action, and spent the entire pre-show trying to find an element of our kitchen landscape that didn’t exude an insane amount of detail. I couldn’t find a single thing, it’s all masterfully curated.
Technically, Consumed is also stunning. They even got the washing machine to spin (?!!). The oven and hob were on, and the smells drifted into the auditorium. These naturalistic elements, alongside the more surreal flickering of the lights as the story unravelled, were pure genius.
As mother and daughter relationships go, Kelly and Posner’s collective portrayals are unbearably accurate. We witness torturous parallels between generations, as Gilly mimes maiming her mother Eileen behind her back, Jenny does the same to Gilly just a few scenes later. It is an electric family dynamic.
Through the play’s explosive finale, which has an air of Sarah Kane about it, we lose some of the drama. Muireann’s speeches tend too much towards slam-poetry, which feels out of place amongst the delicate and precise dialogue that has preceded the ending.
However, the attempt at restoration between the youngest and oldest members of this all-female clan is heartfelt. The idea of inter-generational trauma has been arduously workshopped into every inch of the piece, through echoed sentiments, copied gestures, and each characters’ desire to assert their own hardship whilst trying to make it better for their kin in whatever way they see fit.
Consumed is an absolute gut-punch of a play. Miraculously, it also manages to be completely hilarious, mainly engineered by Eileen’s hysterical interjections. The pre-show playlist made up of female Irish artists was the cherry on top.
Recommended Drink: A whole bottle of red. Maybe two. Just to get through this agonising lunch.
You can catch Consumed until August 24th (not the 18th) at Traverse 1 at Traverse Theatre from 16:15 (80mins). Tickets are available through the EdFringe Online Box Office.
Jake Mace
Lamesha Ruddock
Jasmine Silk
