Consumed is a tense portrait of intergenerational trauma

Eileen’s granddaughter Jenny (Caoimhe Farren) and her teenage daughter Muireann (Muireann Ní Fhaogáin) live in London and haven’t returned to Jenny’s childhood home in three years. The kitchen that greets them shows signs of strain: wallpaper buckles and peels, pictures hang askew and items accumulated by Eileen’s daughter Gilly (Andrea Irvine) overwhelm surfaces. As the lights go down, Sinéad O’Connor’s Famine sets the tone. Each woman is burdened with something. But could the roots of their problems be traced back – to the Troubles, to colonialism – echoing through time?

Brought to the Edinburgh fringe by Paines Plough company, Consumed is directed by Katie Posner, who builds tension with a rumbling soundscape and intermittently flickering lights. There’s intrigue in absence: missing men and repressed feelings drive the plot.

Eileen is sweary, no-nonsense and impatient with the younger women: “You stupid wee girl – we’re not allowed to be soft in a place like this.” Gilly has inherited some of her mother’s outlook, but channels her energy into the pursuit of domestic perfection – a mission undermined by her clear hoarding tendencies. Jenny is quick to anger and desperate to break the cycle with her own daughter by addressing problems directly. And yet a palpable desperation leaks out through her addiction to her phone, and to wine.

Initially, her outbursts feel incongruous against the backdrop of simmering resentments, but Farren’s performance peaks with a raw, upsetting scene that shifts the production into horror.Muireen is overly forthright, at points nearing parody as she comments on famine and generational trauma. But when ghosts descend, she forces her elders to decide: do they want to dig up the past, or bury it deeper?

Consumed is at the Traverse theatre, Edinburgh until 24 August, then touring

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