IT’S a big week for Bangor-based playwright Karis Kelly: our Zoom conversation takes place just days before their Women’s Prize for Playwriting 2022-winning play Consumed will be staged for the very first time at The Belgrade Theatre in Coventry.
“Consumed has been five years in the making, so it feels really good to finally have it be on stage,” enthuses Kelly as opening night of their first non-independently produced play approaches.
“It’s also really nerve-wracking.”
A Paines Plough, Belgrade Theatre, Sheffield Theatres and Women’s Prize for Playwriting production in association with the Lyric in Belfast, following its debut on July 25 in Coventry, Consumed will then move to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for a 20-performance stint from July 31 before heading out on tour.
Set in a fictional Bangor abode - described by the writer as being “full of hungry ghosts, with more than one skeleton in the closet” - the Katie Posner-directed Consumed centres on a 90th birthday party that brings four different generations of women from the same family together around the kitchen table.
Naturally, simmering familial tensions quickly overwhelm the well-wishing and niceties in this darkly funny genre-blurring drama, which features an all-Irish cast including Belfast-born actors Julia Dearden (Derry Girls) and Andrea Irvine (Blue Lights) and Derry talent Caoimhe Farren (The Woman in The Wall).
“This 90th birthday party has put a lot of pressure on everyone for it to be perfect, and it causes multiple ruptures - decades’ worth of tension unfolds between all the different women,” reveals Kelly, whose other writing credits include the BBC’s Hope Street and The Break.
“I always describe the play as a magic trick, because it starts out as a kitchen sink drama and then kind of dissolves into a piece of magical realism.
“There’s lots of twists and moments where you’re like, ‘oh my god, this is not the play I thought I was watching’.”
Thematically, there are a multitude of heavy duty undercurrents pulling at the characters beneath the surface of the storyline.
“The play explores transgenerational trauma, specifically through consumption, whether that’s food or alcohol or shopping,” explains Kelly, who grew up ‘London Irish’: their mum is from Bangor, their dad from Belturbet in Co Cavan.
“It’s this idea of the ‘big black hole’ at the centre of addiction - which is, essentially, a kind of void where love should be - how it passes through the generations and how it’s expressed differently through generations.
“Each of these women is approaching the food and the party with some element of addiction coming to the fore whilst they’re all trying their very best to not let the pot boil over.”
With the issues of sectarianism and Irish national identity also in the mix alongside the aforementioned trans-generational trauma, there’s also a distinctly post-Troubles/Brexit-informed element to the play.
“The youngest member of the family, Muireann [played by Dublin-born newcomer Muireann Ní Fhaogáin], is 14,” says Kelly, whose family moved back to the north from London in 2019, the year before she started working on Consumed.
“Like me, she was raised in London but really wants to understand her heritage - so she’s constantly asking questions that people don’t want to answer.”
The playwright admits that, back in 2020, exploring the long-term effects of conflict and trauma seemed felt quite “distant and nebulous”.
However, given the relentless flood of human misery dominating our current headlines, some of Consumed’s key themes have since become uncomfortably topical.
“We’ve changed the ending slightly,” reveals the playwright, a former writer-in-residence at the Lyric in Belfast who was a recipient of the Peggy Ramsay Foundation and Film4 Playwright’s Scheme Bursary in 2022.
“Previously, it was quite bleak. But my director and I talked about it, and we were like, ‘We need to offer hope. We can’t put anything else out into the world that’s particularly bleak at the moment’.
“So it’s been a really interesting journey. It’s very fascinating how plays can land at the perfect moment and then kind of take on a bigger responsibility.”
That ‘journey’ started in February 2020 with four women who popped into Kelly’s head one day while they were on a creative writing retreat in Co Fermanagh.
“Those four characters just arrived,” recalls Kelly, who will be in conversation about their work with Bangor-based actor Aoibhéann McCann (Blue Lights) at the city’s Open House Festival on August 25.
“I was like, ‘this is interesting, I wonder what this is?’ I wrote the first 10 pages - and then the whole world went into lockdown.
“A bit later, I got an OCD diagnosis and decided to try and figure out where it started.
“I started looking into whether trauma can be passed down and came across all of the stuff around transgenerational trauma. Queen’s has done some really interesting studies, specifically within Northern Ireland.
“So I kind of went down that road and the first iteration of the play kind of came really quickly.”
However, the mass shut-down of theatre, film and television production during the Covid lockdowns also nearly put paid to Kelly’s writing career altogether, as she explains.
“This was around the time when the Tories were encouraging everyone to ‘retrain’ - you’ll probably remember the ‘ballerina in cyber’ ad - and I actually thought maybe I should retrain.
This has to be a joke? Right? pic.twitter.com/hVpxOhkvf7
— Matthew Bourne 💙 (@SirMattBourne) October 12, 2020
“I was looking into new courses and trying to figure out what to do. But I thought, well, I’ve got this first draft, I’ll just send it off to the Women’s Prize and get some feedback - and then I won.
“So it was like, ‘oh, I guess I am sticking with writing then’.”
Kelly adds: “I was writing for 14 years before I won anything. But my writing was the same before the Women’s Prize as after it.
I was writing for 14 years before I won anything
— Karis Kelly
“I could have decided not to send Consumed off and I could have decided to retrain - it would have been a bit of a Sliding Doors moment for me.
“So I really want to encourage people to keep writing. Part of the creative process is being aware that you’re going to have to deal with a lot of rejection, but hopefully eventually someone will say ‘yes’.”
As well as attempting to bring Consumed to Belfast - “I always intended to open it in Belfast and we’ve been trying to get programming in Northern Ireland since it won the prize in 2022, but it’s been really difficult,” she tells me - Kelly has also has a TV series in development with Two Cities (Blue Lights) and has written another play about the north.
Black Magic Ops is a slightly bonkers sounding Celtic metal musical set during the ‘Satanic panics’ about devil-worshipping cults which gripped the north at the height of the 1970s Troubles.
“It tells that story through the eyes of a teenage band in Belfast who are trying to bring the burgeoning sound of heavy metal to Northern Ireland,” explains Kelly.
“We got to workshop that at the National [Theatre, in London] with a full band and a full cast of about 30.
“It was so fun - we took Trad songs and metal-fied them. So yeah, it’s a complete step away from Consumed, but still looking at some of the same themes with regard to what war does to people.”
Here’s hoping it and Consumed make to Belfast - or even Bangor - sooner rather than later.
Karis Kelly in conversation with Aoibhéann McCann, August 25, Court House, Bangor. See openhousefestival.com for full programme details
