“A tight and emotionally charged play that does not shy away from its ambition”
Karis Kelly’s Consumed, winner of the 2025 Women’s Playwriting Competition, arrives in London following an acclaimed run at the Traverse in Edinburgh in 2025. The play is a tight yet emotionally charged piece that unfolds during a single birthday celebration, where four generations of women gather in one space. In just 80 minutes of stage time, intergenerational tensions and buried traumas surface, gradually unveiling a wider history of violence that extends beyond the family itself.
The play truly showcases Kelly’s craftsmanship as a writer, as Consumed unfolds entirely in real time. There are no jumps in chronology; instead, the narrative develops through continuous conversation. It is an ambitious structural choice, yet Kelly’s writing successfully sustains it.
Set at the 90th birthday party of the matriarch in the family, the play places its focus exclusively on the four generations of females in this Northern Irish household. Each of the four characters is sharply defined, and while they may initially appear somewhat archetypal, their interactions generate a dynamic and compelling tension that propels the play forward.
Eileen (played by Julia Dearden) is the great-grandmother of the youngest generation in the household. She is a comedic force on stage. Yet at the same time, she feels deeply relatable to anyone whose grandparents have reached a similar stage of life: someone who has “seen it all,” but, because of the physical limitations of age, whose agency is largely taken away, leading them to be treated exclusively like a care recipient. Gilly (played by Andrea Irvine), her daughter, is portrayed as outwardly calm but prone to emotional eruptions, being overtly polite most of the time and obsessed with maintaining order and a veneer of peace. The character feels both relatable and insufferable at the same time. Irvine’s performance offers a masterclass of both precision and force, rendering this character rich complexity and solid credibility.
In contrast, Gilly’s daughter Jenny (played by Caoimhe Farren) is an alcoholic and an agent of chaos, driven by resentment and unresolved anger toward her mother. The chaos of this character, although often manifested in a slightly melodramatic way, is the true driving force of all the plot points in the play. It’s a hard character to handle, yet Farren’s performance invites both credibility and sympathy toward this character. The youngest, Muireann, is marked by nervous energy and constant, almost stereotypically Gen Z commentary. Compared to other characters in the play, Muireann is probably the most underdeveloped. This flatness in character, however, is not enriched by the performance of Muireann Ní Fhaogáin, who plays the character with nervous energy throughout the entire performance.
For an 80-minute play, Consumed does not shy away from its ambition. What begins as a seemingly light family gathering quickly deepens into an exploration of intergenerational trauma and the enduring legacy of historical violence. It explicitly engages with a familiar yet powerful idea: that harm does not simply disappear; it is inherited, reshaped, and reproduced through generations.
Consumed will continue to play at Park Theatre in London until the 18th of April, with only limited availability remaining here.