Does your family have skeletons in the closet? For Consumed, a play in which four generations of family secrets are unleashed in claustrophobic bursts within the same kitchen in which soup is slurped, chicken sliced and happy birthday sung, the answer can only be yes.
Not so much a play that bubbles and fizzes with energy but cracks and splits open with it, Karis Kelly’s play, as directed by Katie Posner and brought to Leeds Playhouse by Paines Plough, lurches back and forth between humour and horror as though these are the natural fault lines for any family. While witty one liners begin as moments of comic relief, they quickly form part of the hysteria and confusion itself as it becomes increasingly unclear what is and isn’t funny, who can and who can’t be trusted, what is being intentionally ignored and what has been so repressed it is now a point of shared blindness and burden.
The play succeeds in covering a span of quick-fire ideas (from leg hair to famine to epigenetics to vegetarianism) without losing its tightly bound focus. Much of this is attributable not only to the power of the writing but to the set itself; the central kitchen table over which the great grandmother, Eileen, presides in her party hat and with trembling lip, acts as an ever-present image of both stability and vulnerability. It is against this reference point that tensions can be traced from their on-the-nose beginnings (with the great granddaughter, Muireann, complaining about the lack of vegan milk and the family despairing at Gilly’s (the grandmother’s) hoarding habits) to raw questions around belonging, invisibility and blame. Just as points of commonality are found, the conversation thrusts down a different rabbit hole, the set itself trembles, the lights beside the kitchen table flicker, and the stomach once again drops.
The greatest tension of the play appears not at a particular moment on stage, but at the audience’s growing realisation that nothing within this play can be isolated; that there is no quick and easy ‘victim’ or ‘perpetrator’, no true separation of the personal and political. That, just as the characters keep rotating round the kitchen table, there is no escape from the relentless recurrence of the past.
Or is there? In an ending which risks feeling abrupt without longer and further exploration, there is left an ambiguity into which the audience can pour their own interpretations and with it write their own endings to a 90-year, convulsing, electric and razor-sharp 70 minutes.
A Paines Plough, Belgrade Theatre, Sheffield Theatres and Women’s Prize for Playwriting production.
In association with the Lyric Belfast
Courtyard Theatre at Leeds Playhouse10-13 September
Age guide 14+
Box office 0113 213 7700
Book online leedsplayhouse.org.uk
Access Performances:
BSL interpreted: Thursday 11 September, 7.45pm
Captioned: Saturday 13 September, 7.45pm
Photography by Pamela Raith. Main image Julia Dearden and Andrea Irvine.
