Review: Consumed (Touring)

Wednesday 10th September 2025 at Leeds Playhouse

Reviewer: Branagh O’Shaughnessy

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Karis Kelly’s Consumed promises hungry ghosts and skeletons, and I have to say it delivers, just not in the way you would expect.

Four generations of women are reunited for Elieen’s 90th birthday, set in a homely and somewhat cluttered kitchen in Bangor (set: Lily Arnold). The play opens with Great Granny sitting at the kitchen table, party hat and grimace in tow. What follows, under direction of Katie Posner, is a slow and steady coalescence into complete family dysfunction. Exchanges between the matriarch and her daughter, Gilly (Andrea Irvine) and in turn between Gilly and Jenny (Caoimhe Farren), are highly charged with a pulsing tension maintained throughout performances. As the scenes unfold, you get a strong sense of something simmering beneath the surface. 

Julia Deardan’s performance of Eileen as a bitter, self-centred and hateful crone is exceptional and acts as the glue keeping the cast and characters together – it is her 90th birthday after all! Heated exchanges between Gilly and Jenny resonate with anyone lucky enough to be part of a home including a teenaged daughter and mother. Andrea Irvine plays Gilly, the manic and scatter-brained homemaker, and Caoimhe Farren plays the neurotic and explosive Jenny. Last, Muireann Ní Fhaogáin plays her namesake, a clinically anxious English byproduct of a Protestant-Catholic marriage.

Consumed is a play about the broken heart of Northern Irish women. Women tasked with keeping the family together, running a home, and keeping up appearances for the neighbours, all in the haunting historical context of bloodshed over the border. Dark humour and tongue-in-cheek dialogue is injected throughout to somewhat take the load off. However the core themes of this play are heavy ones.

Consumed is an exploration and alchemisation of intergenerational trauma. The closing scene with Eileen and Muireann is full to the brim with long-harboured pain and the healing power of maternal love. Devices of magical realism work wonderfully up until the very last moments.

When you go to see Consumed, buckle up and take a dive into the world of neurotic, emotionally repressed, alcohol-abusing but loving, funny, strong and compelling Northern Irish women.

Consumed is at Leeds Playhouse until September 13th 2025 – more information and tickets can be found here.