Consumed – Review – Sheffield Playhouse
By Clare Jenkins, September 2025
Karis Kelly’s hit Edinburgh Fringe play Consumed gives a whole other, darker meaning to kitchen sink drama. Winner of the Women’s Prize for Playwriting in 2022, it’s like a female-only Look Back in Anger, with horror lurking under the floorboards and in the cupboards of designer Lily Arnold’s meticulously recreated kitchen. Blackly, bleakly funny, in-your-face and challenging, it’s also not for the easily offended.
Four generations of one dysfunctional Northern Ireland family gather to mark the 90th birthday of matriarch Eileen, a bitter, foul-mouthed widow played to the vicious-tongued hilt by Julia Dearden. “Gluten – is that German?” she spits at her London-born-and-bred granddaughter Muireann. “It’s hard enough deciphering the accent without you speaking in tongues.”
The organiser of the birthday party is Elieen’s daughter Gilly (Andrea Irvine), unnaturally calm one minute, laughing manically the next, obviously heading from half-crazed to full-blown breakdown at any moment – especially when the phone rings.
“Intimate, domestic setting”
One ‘guest’ is her London-based daughter Jenny (Caoimhe Farren), elegant yet pent-up with rage: “You’ve always enjoyed silencing me,” she screams at her mother at one point. The other is Jenny’s angst-ridden, angry-faced teen daughter Muireann (Muireann Ni Fhaogain), full of anguish about climate change, “western cowardice” and eating anything that once had a face, believing as she does that the animal’s fear is passed on to the eater.
In fact, she says, quoting a genetic scientific experiment, fear and trauma are also passed down through humans. Thanks to that inheritance, all the characters are consumed by their past, all blaming the preceding generation for their own anxieties. And so – despite the party hats and the balloons, the birthday cake and candles – the scene is set for one god-almighty battle in an intimate, domestic setting of roast meat and simmering soup. A meal they never eat because they’re too consumed by their own pasts.
“Explosive”
Instead of a slow burn, though, director Katie Posner makes the play explosive from the start, voice volume set to 11. Which means there’s hardly anywhere for the emotions to go as the anger ramps up, the laughter and shrieking become more hysterical, and the accusations fly around like the plastic bags Jenny hoards in one cupboard – much to Muireann’s environmentalist dismay.
Among the resentments, religious distrust inevitably rears its head: “United Ireland? Over my f…ing dead body,” says Eileen at one point. The Troubles are fleetingly mentioned at the start, coming into sharper focus towards the end, with Northern Ireland’s violent past seen as instrumental in the secrets kept, the damage done, personal and national histories overlapping. “It’s like walking on raw nerves,” as Gilly says.
“We don’t hide from uncomfortable truths, do we sweet?” she tells Muireann, as they reveal the latter’s eating disorder. Yet, while constantly asking where her father is, she’s evasive about her own husband’s whereabouts.
“Revealing the tenderness”
Before “Northern Ireland’s famous wall of silence” (as Muireann puts it) finally breaks down, we’ve been treated/subjected to a host of acute observations, sharp one-liners and howls of pain.
When the horrors at last emerge, all four know they have a choice. “You have to look away to survive,” Eileen tells her great-granddaughter, finally revealing the tenderness she has always kept fiercely guarded.
“No, Granny,” says the more emotionally open, less life-tested Muireann, “you have to face it.”
And face it they do…
‘Consumed’ is at the Sheffield Playhouse until 11th October
