I think we can all agree at that this stage in human history, no genre – or subgenre, whatever – has been more comprehensively done to death than the dinner party reunion play.
I say this not to criticise Northern Irish playwright Karis Kelly for having the temerity to write a drama in which four female generations of the Gillespie familiy gather for the occasion of Eileen’s ninetieth birthday and drinks are taken, secrets are revealed etcetera etcetera. But I do wonder if some of the wackier decisions at the end come from a well-meaning but ill-advised desire to break the mould.
In fact for much of its length Katie Posner’s production for Paines Plough makes for a perfectly decent play, even if it does have a familiar rhythm. Julia Dearden is great fun as the sweary, outspokenly Unionist Eileen; Andrea Irvine, Caoimhe Farren and Muireann Ni Fhaogáin are all solid as, respectively, Eileen’s mumsy but on edge daughter Gilly, strident granddaughter Jenny and sensitive English great granddaughter Muireann.
Everything putters on nicely, with Dearden’s caustic comic performance keeping things lively as we edge towards revelations about the whereabouts of Gilly and Jenny’s absent husbands. And then Consumed goes totally nuts, with a trio of mountingly bombastic twists fired off in bewilderingly rapid succession. The whereabouts of Jenny’s husband turns out to be fairly pedestrian. Gilly’s is wild. And a further revelation from Eileen is just totally out there, pitching the whole thing into the metaphysical in a way that gives us little time to process what else we’ve just seen.
It goes so crazy that you can hardly accuse Kelly of confirming to cliche (although it does all fall under ‘secrets are revealed’). But it’s all too much and very hard to know what to make of it – the two final twists don’t feel particularly sympathetic to each other and we’re not given time to digest them. I think Kelly is offering some commentary on the nature of the Northern Irish soul and the idea it involves generational trauma that stretches right back to the Irish Famine, which still rings on in these women’s bodies, long after living memory of it has gone. But there’s no room for any of this to breathe – Consumed devours itself in a cacophonous, bewildering revelation dump.
