“We had to look away to survive,” pleads Eileen, a Northern Irishwoman whose 90th birthday celebration has devolved into a family therapy session. Eileen’s daughter, Gilly, who is hosting the party, has O.C.D. and is prone to hoarding; Gilly’s daughter, Jenny, drinks too much; and Jenny’s teenage daughter, Muireann, isn’t eating enough. Muireann believes these psychological ailments are the effects of psychic pain — dating back to the 19th-century Irish Famine — that have been carried in the body and handed down the generations.
This is the setup for “Consumed,” one of several plays about trauma at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which runs through Monday. It’s easy to see why dramatists are drawn to this theme: For the political playwright, trauma serves as a bridge between the impersonal forces of history and the individual psyche; it humanizes politics by bringing us face-to-face with its human consequences. And in the personal sphere, it functions as a kind of skeleton key, a fast-track to insight and understanding.
“Consumed,” by the Northern Irish playwright Karis Kelly, straddles both of these terrains, exploring the prickly internal dynamics of a family shaped by the legacy of the decades-long period of bloodshed in Northern Ireland, known as the Troubles, which ended in 1998. Blending kitchen-sink drama with psychological horror, it’s intense stuff — the customary preshow trigger warning seemed to go on forever — but Julia Dearden as the cantankerous, foul-mouthed Eileen, who supported the pro-British side in the conflict, provides some levity.
She seemingly has little in common with the touchy-feely vegetarian Muireann (an assured professional debut by Muireann Ní Fhaogáin), who speaks with an English accent but maintains that she’s Irish. But, as grim secrets come to light, we realize that Eileen’s no-nonsense persona and staunch anti-Catholic posturing were a protective carapace, the result of a lifetime’s repressed emotion.
The soul, brutalized by conflict, needs a balm. For the Palestinian actor and comedian Alaa Shehada, who hails from Jenin in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, that balm was art. His poignant solo show, “The Horse of Jenin,” takes its name from a public sculpture that was made with scrap metal from vehicles destroyed in a 2002 attack by Israel’s military on an ambulance whose Palestinian driver was responding to an emergency in defiance of an Israeli curfew.
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The post These Plays Don’t Repress the Trauma, They Bring It to Life Onstage appeared first on New York Times.
