Consumed at Park Theatre review: an uneven Irish comedy with obsidian-black humour

Caoimhe Farren, Julia Dearden and Andrea Irvine - (Helen Murray)

Ireland’s legacy of trauma is explored through four generations of women in Karis Kelly’s narratively uneven but obsidian-black comedy, which won the 2022 Women’s Prize for Playwriting. It’s Ulsterwoman Eileen Gillespie’s 90th birthday at the cluttered house in Bangor, County Down, that she unhappily shares with her daughter Gilly. Her granddaughter Jenny and great-grand-daughter Muireann are over from London. The absence of menfolk adds an ominous dimension to the spiky hilarity that ensues.

As the title suggests, the famine of 1845 is identified as the foundational wound that will not heal: fourteen-year-old Muireann has an eating disorder as well as general anxiety over the state of the world, and a name no one in England can pronounce. (The inability of Rob Delaney’s character to enunciate his daughter Muireann’s name was a running gag in his and Sharon Horgan’s sitcom Catastrophe: it’s funny that here the character is played by actress Muireann Ní Fhaogáin.)