The Truth will Out: Intergenerational Trauma in
Karis Kelly’s Consumed
Source here
“Consumed” by Karis Kelly belongs to what has been deemed “New Writing,” a type of contemporary writing characterized by unconventional and fragmented language, confessional in tone, culturally, socially, and politically committed. Karis Kelly has been awarded “The Women’s Prize for Playwriting in 2022” for this play.
In her acknowledgements, Karis Kelly draws you into the play and to her voice behind the play. She thanks those who have been with her at the helm of this journey, those who have unlocked something vital in her and made her pursue the dream of putting it down in words. She devotes this play to her mother, to all Northern Irish women, “for your grit, your resilience, your way with words. For your humour, generosity and incredible revolutionary spirit … I am so proud of us, of all the conflicting truths we hold, and the peace we have maintained in this island.”
There we were, we, women, in the reading club, Thursday session, Friday session, voice attuned digging out the meanings, and unlayering the words in an enthusiastic unison of getting to the bone of it: we talked about the layering of many worlds (Petra / Celia /Begoña / Miriam) in the play (political, cultural, social, environmental and feminist issues at stake), the historical moments implied (The Troubles, the famine in Northern Ireland), the many identities intersecting, deranged Gilly (Begoña), their family constellations (Geni) about them venting trauma, hiding trauma, the difficulties of the verbal pyrotechnics of theatre in written word (Eva / Nuria) or the easiness of the swift exchanges (Sandra).
Karis Kelly says in an interview that the play has sprung as a necessity to release intergenerational trauma and catalyse, in a cathartic way, an eating disorder she suffered for many years. She mentions in this interview that Northern Ireland has the highest rate of OCD.
The cover of the book illustrates the four generations through four women’s heads embedded in a puzzle:
“I was created in the womb of the womb of women in Ireland” (Muireann, page 61)
The play begins in a realistic, everyday style, lightened by touches of comedy that soften the tragedy beneath. This gentle bathos establishes the mood for the events to come.
The play is set in Bangor, Ireland, but the space is reduced to a house, a kitchen, and four characters. Props perfectly placed, a gleaming surface of order opens the first scene, and havoc unfolds towards the end. The house has a human quality of its own, with its cracks and crevices that mirror the cracks and crevices of these four generations of women (Mónica’s comparison with “The Fall of the House of Usher”)
It is Eileen’s 90th Birthday, but the story is not about a Birthday; it is about the tendrils and the roots that spread and lie hidden.
Eileen has lived through the Troubles, Irish famine; she was an Ulster Scot who changed her religious beliefs for a bowl of soup (Geni / Sonia / Conchi) and does not understand Muireann’s new world of oversized clothes, and gluten-free meals, which she jokes about, “gluten”... is that German? (Belén).
Gilly is trapped in provincial Bangor, “sacrificed herself” for her daughter-- she has sent her to University in London-- lives in the mind, and suffers from OCD, hoarding stuff. She is constantly doing things not to think. They are both part of what Muireeann (4th generation) will call in the play “the wall of silence in Northern Ireland”. Both mother and daughter, Eileen and Gilly, cannot bear to look at each other. Gilly’s husband is off stage, hanging behind a tetris of cardboard boxes that she has herself collected, suicide. The party must go on, and the man remains in the closet; tragedy unfolds. Gilly’s husband partly materializes the uncomfortable hidden truths that are to be obviated, the corpse in the cellar, which echoes that famous Victorian quote: “skeleton in the closet” (Belén) :
“The phrase first appeared in print in the 1816 issue of The Eclectic Review and was used by writers like William Makepeace Thackeray in The Newcomes to suggest hidden, embarrassing family secrets.”Source: here
All the men in the play are absent; it is only Muireann’s boyfriend who accepts her as she is (Emma).
Jenny (third generation) forgets herself in drinking, resents her mother, Gilly, and is cheated by her husband, Ronnan. Muireann (fourth generation) has an eating disorder, is committed to feminism, environmentalism, and political and social awareness. She bears the Irish name that no one can pronounce, lives in London, and feels astride between two worlds. Her eating disorder turns into a metaphor for all the women in the play: hiding, controlling, stuffing the truth inside…
"You suck everything! Consume everything! All the space! All the air" (Muireann to Jenny, brought forward by Servando)
She believes that intergenerational trauma is passed on through the genes, one could adduce an expiation move rather than a scientific one (Nuria):
“It is called epigenetics. In between the genes. All the stuff we can’t see. So—so—so, loads of things can be passed down. But they’ve thought for years that this stuff is genetic. Like, they think that there’s maybe a suicide gene...And, maybe, maybe ...an alcoholism gene”
It is precisely Muireann at the end of the play that drags Eileen to embrace the past, to dig out little Robbie’s corpse below the kitchen table, buried during The Troubles after a bullet passed through his throat. Eileen must get in the mud, enter the hole, and see the past in the eyes:
Muireann: “We have to look at the thing. The thing we all refuse to look at… Come on Granny-leen. They starve. You starve. We starve. Us. It. Them. A change in the genes.The carried shame. It goes on and on forever. Don’t you want to end this? It’s me. It’s me that has to carry it. Please! We can end it. Together. For me.
The play ends in a surrealistic way with the "walls swelling and expanding, the ribcage of the house cracking open, all the wounds now letting light through, the house acquiring a human quality to it (Celia / Servando pointed to this surrealistic tone).
