FRIDAY, MARCH 6, 2026

Consumed
From left to right: Muireann Ní Fhaogáin as Muireann O'Shea, Andrea Irvine as Gilly
Gillespie, Julia Dearden as Eileen Gillespie and Caoimhe Farren as Jenny O'Shea in
'Consumed'. Production Photo: Pamela Raith

Having reflected on Karis Kelly's Consumed, directed by Katie Posner, for several days, I've reached the conclusion that it's about all sorts of things, but most significantly, it's about soup. It's about the carrot and coriander soup that is served for titular consumption during the play, as a form of meeting and meaning. A seemingly foolproof way of meeting dietary needs at a dinner table is also a means of making sense of a family. For soup is like a family union or reunion, tasteful or even wonderful to consume as a form of nourishment or as atmospherics, and great looking when everything or everyone comes together. But one may be less likely to be as enthused by the ingredients or individuals when they're viewed separately.

So it is for the four generations of women in Consumed's family, a family who really don't get on – the ninety-year-old great-grandmother Eileen Gillespie, played by Julia Dearden; her sixty-five-year-old daughter Gilly, played by Andrea Irvine; Gilly's forty-year-old daughter Jenny O'Shea, played by Caoimhe Farren; and Jenny's fourteen-year-old daughter Muireann, played by Muireann Ní Fhaogáin. Hailing from East Belfast, Bangor, who-knows-where and West London respectively, this fractured foursome are temporarily reunited under a Bangor-based roof on a marvel of a Lily Arnold set. With a huge table at its centre, angled placement, a stairway with a cupboard underneath and appliances that I am told really work, Arnold's structure, along with her colourful costume design, truly utilises the potential for full-on expression in three-dimensional space at Belfast's Lyric Theatre.

Expression which carries not only drama, but humour, energy and a kind of sly wickedness, with all four actresses savouring their roles while Posner's sure-handed direction guides them through Kelly's powerful script. An especially powerful script, for each character is packed with such detail that it would be easy for the audience to lose track of the story and the laughs. But the balance is astonishingly well struck, with small and large transitions from frivolity to seriousness handled with aplomb. It's a miracle of character attachment and character detachment altogether.

Julia Dearden as Eileen Gillespie and Caoimhe Farren as Jenny O'Shea in 'Consumed'.
Production Photo: Pamela Raith

But where does the soup come into it? Well, for one, it is the starter at Great-Granny Eileen's birthday party, and she doesn't approve of it. She doesn't like "food that's too wet" and carries a grumpy demeanour reminiscent of Roald Dahl's Grandma from George's Marvellous Medicine - a little like that character, she's self-centred and unsettling, very much a "grizzly old grunion" as Dahl himself would put it. Her self-focus echoes itself in the generations below her - the hugely troubled Gilly, the foul-mouthed, stressed out Jenny, and the intellectual, curious Muireann, their torrential travails adding to a mixture of individual ingredients for a sort of "family soup" which we can't help but examine and be entranced by.

Consumed's intergenerational differences are effortlessly and eloquently exposed both vividly and vivaciously, as a succession of sharp-tongued one-liners smoothly and smartly align with regularly and shockingly unearthed secrets. Like any great play I’ve seen this decade, it stands to gain further value not only from its larger-and-louder-than-life moments but its little ones, such as the sight of tinned and jarred food in the cupboard that has gone unused for too long, the tearing away of a landline from the wall and the universe of knowledge that finds itself at Muireann’s finger tips before she's really ready for it. All are symbols of a loss of dependence, of worldwide evolution, and of mental health, forms of convenience and understanding translating to forms of cognitive overload prior to an overwhelming finale.

This brings me back, again, to the soup, as food and as metaphor - the kind which is frequently easy to take in as a packaged blend but much harder to swallow in pieces. Considering Consumed in this manner presents the reminder that while truth which cosily coheres is preferable to one that devastatingly divides, survival and growth is built on both. As Dahl's George did after concocting his "marvellous" medicines, one does feel quite trembly after consuming Consumed. One knows that something special has taken place on the Lyric's Main Stage. For over an hour we have not merely been consumed by but subsumed in the passionately volatile, darkly comedic and poignantly revelatory character and scenario developments in this tale of tantalising turbulence.

Simon Fallaha

A co-production between Belfast's Lyric Theatre, Paines Plough and the Park Theatre, London, Consumed runs at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, until Sunday March 8 before a run at the Park Theatre from Wednesday March 18 to Saturday April 18 inclusive. For more information on, and tickets for, the Lyric Theatre run, click here. For more on the Park Theatre run, click here.