'Too much emotion' - Consumed at Park Theatre review

A dear friend once said that “theatre just has too much emotion”. I understandably blanched at this – my poor crying baby? But sometimes the sentiment proves flinchingly true.

Karis Kelly’s play Consumed, fresh off a tour and on the back of a sell-out run at the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe, has landed, or more appropriately careered, into a messy, flame-licked crater of trauma and misery.

Four generations of women gather in Bangor (Northern Ireland) for an afternoon (stretching on for eternity) of soup, sadness and suicide. Mother Jenny O’Shea and daughter Muireann O’Shea, fleeing family problems in London, collide with Grandmother Gilly Gillespie and Great Grandmother Eileen Gillespie, simmering in their own issues in the family home, all under the auspices of Gilly’s 90th birthday party. A gentleman caller (Glass Menagerie–style Jim), the father–grandfather–stepson to the collected women, is always on the cusp of appearing.

Billed as a dark comedy, the drama shows that Kelly can write snapping humour and female dynamics confidently. “The hair’s new… it’s… short,” shoots between Jenny and Gilly. Weaponising age and political outbursts on the state of the union by Gilly, constant discussion and sniping (“no figure speak”) between the generations, the narrative edges knowingly towards the figurative. The script is peppered with the snarl that the Irish… wait, no, the Northern Irish… wait, no, English, Anglo-Irish… hold on, Great British?… are known for. Ahh, safe!

Julia Dearden as Eileen is the swinging battle-axe of the matriarchs, one minute exploding about the Troubles, the next threatening to cut her dead husband’s unmentionables off if he cheated. She predictably struggles with modern terms, hearing “hoarding” as “whoring”, but throughout crafts a believable yet hilariously tough woman born out of a traumatic time. Equally, Andrea Irvine as Gilly copes with the past in a different way, boxing it up – quite literally. Maniacally laughing throughout, she turns a printed silk shoulder to issues and conversations she doesn’t like and shows an impressive ability to force the happy-family narrative in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary. If the train to Delulu had a conductor, she would be it.

But where does satire end and poignancy begin? Can a comedy also be a tragedy? Life, unlike art, doesn’t define itself in terms of these thematic boxes, and maybe that is my answer. But theatre is certainly not life.

Lily Arnold’s naturalistic bisected house and costumes, Beth Duke’s sound, and Guy Hoare’s lighting design throw some atmospheric crackling and flashes our way, but all sit firmly within the kitchen-sink-drama remit.

Katie Posner’s direction seems to want to wring as much empathetic juice out of us as possible, especially as the cast pick up pace – drinking, shrieking, throwing things and scalding each other (literally and metaphorically). Undeniably the script has satirical threads – stuffing potatoes into each other’s mouths, skeletons in the closet, depression under the floor, TROUBLE – but the lack of a sparkle of humour on the boards, especially in the final section, lands the piece uncomfortably between the two genres.

Muireann Ní Fhaogáin as Muireann, the part-Catholic, part-Protestant Gen Z-er, does her best, but her character is the most two-dimensional, bleating about the planet and mental health in a way that seems to ridicule her generation. The play ends in an almost hour-long emotional purging, unclear whether it takes itself seriously or not, and therefore whether we should.

Consumed
Until 18 April 2026
Park Theatre
Clifton Terrance
N4 3JP