Award winning playwright Karis Kelly told David Hennessy about her play Consumed which deals with themes of identity and generational trauma.
Women’s Prize for the Playwriting 2022 Karis Kelly’s Consumed is about to travel Britain taking in venues in Coventry, Sheffield, Guildford and Leeds as well as the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
The play depicts four generations of Northern Irish women reunited under one roof for a 90th birthday party.
Katie Posner directs a cast made up of Julia Dearden (Cyprus Avenue, Derry Girls), Caoimhe Farren (The Ferryman in the West End, Derry Girls and The Woman in the Wall), Andrea Irvine (Blue Lights) and Muireann Ní Fhaogáin, a graduate of LAMDA, who makes her professional stage debut as Muireann.
Described as a pitch black and twisted comedy, Consumed deals with themes such as dysfunctional family dynamics, generational trauma and national boundaries.
Identity is a big theme of the play and also in Karis’ life.
Karis was born in Bangor, Northern Ireland with a parent from either side of the divide. Then the family relocated to London adding London Irish to her mix of identities.
Although she once did not like her mixed identity, she feels it stands to her as a writer.
Playwright Karis Kelly took time to chat to us about the play before it hits the road.
What inspired Consumed?
“One of the key things Consumed explores is identity.
“Both my parents are Northern Irish and they left during the conflict.
“They’re mixed marriage: My father’s Catholic, my mother’s Protestant.
“I was predominantly raised in London.
“I identify as London Irish and I also identify as Northern Irish but my accent doesn’t quite match my experience of my identity.
“I sat down to write it during lockdown.
“I had an OCD diagnosis and I really wanted to figure out where that started.
“Ireland actually has a really high incidence of OCD so I started looking into family traits, ancestry, exploring all of that and then came across transgenerational trauma and epigenetics and how these things kind of knit themselves and weave themselves into our DNA.”
It’s about four different generations of women. Is it that thrown together again, tensions come to the surface?
“Absolutely, each of the characters manages their feelings of deprivation and lack in different ways and each of the characters identify in a different way towards their Irishness.
“You’ve got Eileen who is the great grandmother who’s cantankerous, very emotionally repressive but whip smart and very funny.
“And then you’ve got her daughter Gilly who is permanently disassociated and a big hoarder and obsessed with making this party perfect.
“And then you have her daughter Jenny, who has lived in London for over 20 years and doesn’t enjoy coming home that much and has quite a fraught relationship with her mother.
“And then you’ve got her daughter, the youngest member of the four generations, who is Muireann, who is London Irish, 14.
“Just putting those four women together around this really important moment and how all of the resentments and frustrations with each other leak out throughout the play, it gets quite big and cruel at moments but it’s essentially a story of how we find our way back to each other and also how we move past and heal from all these different afflictions.
“The play explores how starvation affects a change in the genes and it also explores how conflict affects a change in the genes.
“A Queen’s University study showed that teenagers now in the north of Ireland have the same elevated cortisol levels as if they were experiencing the conflict.
“It looked at how stress stays within the body and is passed down.
“When I wrote the play five years ago, the idea of starvation as a colonial tool was really nebulous but obviously with what’s going on in the Middle East the play now has taken on a whole other kind of meaning.
“It’s really powerful to watch within the current context of what we’re all experiencing.”
That’s interesting. Someone might say to Muireann that she knows nothing of the bad times but, when there’s such a thing as generational trauma, that can’t be the case at all…
“Absolutely, yeah.
“There’s even a line in the play where Muireann says someone said, ‘You can’t identify as Irish’.
“And she says, ‘But I am. It’s in me. I don’t have a choice’.
“I think it’s so fascinating that we’re finally starting to understand that some things are passed down and change the way you relate to the world and change your stress levels and change how you feel about yourself.
“One of the things that’s often levelled at my particular section of the family is, ‘Oh, well, you wouldn’t know anything because you left’.
“But I often think, ‘Yes, my parents left. They got out but what did they take with them and how has that affected me? What anxieties do I have that are related to my dad’s experiences or things that my mam saw?’
“We’re now at a point in history where we’re starting to really understand that just because you don’t talk about things doesn’t mean that they don’t affect generations to come.
“I didn’t realise until I was older how much of a big choice being a mixed marriage was at the time because a number of my aunts and uncles are also in mixed marriages so for me I was like, ‘Oh, it’s normal’.
“But as I’ve got older I’m like, ‘Wow, it was very bold’.
“And it also definitely affected our relationships with my grandparents on both sides because we were kind of this thing that they didn’t necessarily understand and finding your place in that is always really interesting because to one side of the family, you’re Catholic and then to the other side of the family, you’re English and you’re like, ‘Where do I sit in all of this?’
“But it’s really useful being a writer.
“I can’t remember who said it but someone said, ‘A good writer should be a stranger in every place that they go’.
“And I do feel like that.
“I used to be frustrated when I was younger at not having a fixed identity and feeling a little bit like an outsider but I actually think it’s incredibly useful.”
Do you remember a time when you became conscious of having a complex or different identity?
“I actually do.
“I went to Catholic school.
“I was taught by nuns for my sins because I was in a London Irish area.
“A lot of the other children there were London Irish and I remember on St Patrick’s Day wearing green and having one of the other children in the playground say, ‘You can’t wear green because you’re Northern Irish’.
“And I didn’t understand the difference.
“I had to speak to my dad about it and he said, ‘Of course you can wear green’.
“And then, similarly, I remember being taught by the nuns that if you’re not Catholic, you don’t get to go to heaven.
“I remember putting up my hand and saying, ‘But my mum’s Protestant’ and them saying, ‘Well, she won’t go to heaven then’.”
What a thing to say to a child…
“I know.
“But if anyone’s been taught by nuns, you know they weren’t necessarily very nice.
“I remember all of these kind of crucial moments in my childhood.”
You said you were in an Irish area in London, whereabouts were you?
“I grew up in Harrow and I went to school in Ealing so I was North West, west London for most of my life.
“I had a lot of access to the London Irish community.
“Actually Consumed is being rehearsed in the London Irish Centre.
“I was delighted about that because it’s a full homecoming.”
You mentioned that one character in the play is not so keen to return to Northern Ireland, is that something that comes from your experience?
“No, Northern Ireland’s my home.
“I love being there.
“It’s where I feel most myself.
“The key thing for Jenny is that in London, she can be any version of Irish that she decides because it doesn’t matter to people in England.
“Jenny is less interested in the borders that her grandmother is quite obsessed with.”
Was it more difficult at one time to return though?
“I do remember it being more fraught.
“I’m 37 now so I remember some of the conflict but I do remember the tenseness of returning as a child and that that was a difficult thing.
“I do think that it was hard for my dad to be in London in the 70s with a very thick Northern Irish accent.
“Actually when I was 13 the Real IRA bombed Ealing.
“This was post-peace process in 2001 and that was another time when it was very difficult to be Irish in London again, especially Northern Irish.
“I remember at the time a lot of the people that I went to school with were saying ‘Your dad’s in the IRA’ and all of this stuff.”
There’s several important themes in the play: Mothers, love, also food…
“The play looks at each of the characters’ relationship to food.
“There is such a thing as what they’ve called a starvation gene.
“If the body’s been subjected to starvation, it forever changes how you relate to food.
“Mothers and daughters are a really big theme.
“The idea of the Irish mammy and how differently they relate to their sons and their daughters.
“There’s a lot of comedy to be had through that but looking at this idea of the way we treat each other and the subtle cruelties.
“It does also explore patriarchy and the things that men are allowed to do that women aren’t necessarily.
“There’s a lot in there that I think is really relatable to a lot of people.
“Everyone who reads the play says, ‘Oh my God. I know that woman’.
“They have been drawn from a lot of truth, I feel.”
Isn’t it also violent?
“Yeah, there’s a real undertone of violence throughout the play.
“It really speaks about how we look away, especially in the north.
“To survive, people had to just look away.
“When I first wrote the play, that was something that felt very inherent from being in the north of Ireland.
“There’s always a catchphrase, ‘What good is digging up the dead?’
“You just have to keep going to survive.
“But within the context of the current world that we find ourselves in, I think everyone is doing it.
“We’re on our phones 24/7 and there will be a really heinous image of a dead child, and people scroll past.
“You have to look away and it is a survival mechanism in some ways to be able to kind of continue on with our everyday lives when such violence is being perpetrated out in the world.”
As serious as the themes that the play deals with are, there is also humour in it which is very Northern Irish to use some gallows humour..
“Yeah, it’s the only way I know to write anything serious.
“I think that is from being raised in households where something awful will be dealt with and then the joke will be made and everyone will laugh.
“My favourite thing to do is to kind of lull an audience into a false sense of security with laughter and then punch them in the gut, disarm them and then make them look at something difficult.
“I really think that theatre has to be playful.
“Even in its darkest moments, there has to be an element of playfulness and that is crucial to keep an audience entertained despite moving them, despite shocking them, despite making them question their own life and holding up a mirror.
“It’s really important that, for me, work is infused with humour.
“I think the purpose of theatre is to hold a mirror up to audiences and to get them to question.
“I also think part of what’s so brilliant about work that you see that can be shocking and cruel and uncomfortable is that it’s very human.
“I think all families can be cruel to each other and say some of the worst things, that you would never say to anyone else, to each other.
“I hope that people in the audience will recognise themselves in the work and it might leave them with a bigger question around, ‘How do we find our way back to each other? How do we end cycles of violence?’
And, ‘Where are we as a nation in the north of Ireland?’
“Because we’re on the precipice of a big change, I feel, and the only way we’re going to navigate that is together.”
This is an award- winning script as you won the Women’s Prize for playwriting in 2022 and you were also the recipient of the Peggy Ramsay Foundation and Film4 Playwright’s Scheme Bursary, what did it mean to receive such honours?
“It was incredible.
“It was the midst of lockdown and all the theatres were closed.
“There was all this thing about retraining.
“I was thinking, ‘I’m going to have to retrain. I can’t do this’.
“But I just had this tiny little voice that said, ‘Send the play off’.
“And then it won and it has absolutely changed my career.
“It’s opened so many doors.
“It’s been really genuinely life changing.
“I was so delighted to be the first Irish, Northern Irish writer to win the award.
“I think, for such a small place, we punch well above our weight in terms of the output of drama and the arts and considering we’re so poorly funded, it is really remarkable.”
You feel passionately about females and non-binarys not getting the same opportunities as men..
“100%, I feel so passionate about it that.
“One of the reasons I decided to write Consumed was because I hadn’t seen Northern Irish women written as I know them to be.
“I always saw them portrayed as victims, maybe paramilitaries’ wives, often secondary characters that service the male character on stage.
“And I was like, ‘Right, these women are witty and funny and nuanced and great craic and bold and outspoken and revolutionary and yet I’m not seeing that on stage’.
“That was part of the reason I sat down and decided to write Consumed.
“Northern Irish women deserve to see authentic depictions of themselves and they deserve to see themselves depicted by Northern Irish women and that doesn’t happen so much.
“Say Nothing was written by an American man.
“We have the talent in the north so why aren’t we getting to tell our stories?
“I feel very passionately about changing that.”
I bet you are looking forward to seeing what the reactions are to the piece as it shows Northern Irish women how you know them..
“It’s a very heightened piece in a lot of ways but I hope people leave moved.
“I hope they leave challenged.
“I hope they leave with a number of questions that I’ve kind of infused into the play.
“And I hope they leave with hope.
“We need to look at how we move past cycles of violence.
“My position as someone who has a parent from both side of the divide means that I can hold multiple truths at once.
“I’m able to say ‘I hear that’ and ‘I hear that’ and I have total empathy for both sides.
“I think that the only way that we can navigate through such difficult times is through really open communication and to be able to hold multiple truths at once.
“And what we’ve talked about a lot in the room is that there can be more than one victim in a space.
“If we assume that one person is a victim then we’re assuming that the other person is the perpetrator and that is not always the case.
“The play explores this through the way the characters interact with each other.
“It explores victim and perpetrator dynamics.
“I think that there’s a lot to take from the play to begin to understand how we keep the peace, how we move forward, how we end cycles of violence and how we can best relate to each other.
“Hopefully the audience will walk out and go, ‘We can do this. There is hope. There is a way to move past cycles of violence’.”
Consumed is at Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh (Fringe Festival) 31 July- 24 August, Belgrade Theatre in Coventry 3- 6 September, Leeds Playhouse 10- 13 September, Yvonne Arnaud Theatre 16- 20 September and Sheffield Theatres 24 September- 11 October.
For more information and to book, click here.
