Five years after her autobiographical solo show about drowning and postnatal depression, I’m a Phoenix, Bitch, Bryony Kimmings returns with her latest performance Bog Witch, still showcasing her most signature performance style: humorous audience engagement, gradually sinking into darkness and desperation, and, of course, a miniature doll’s house.
Bog Witch charts Kimmings’s life after her drowning. She moves to the Sussex countryside with her son and partner where she navigates the cycles of the seasons as well as the fluctuations in her own life, including another pregnancy and an unfortunate miscarriage. Alongside, she also encounters Esther, an enthusiastic environmentalist inviting her to join the Council of All Beings, where the locals dress up to symbolise a part of the ecosystem, a badger or an oak tree, to embody their concerns about human beings.
As in her previous work, Kimmings remains a master of using humour to engage with her audience. In a solo performance, such humour is indispensable to gather attention and to allow compassion. While in nature, Bog Witch is a deeply self-reflective, inherently bitter, and emotionally difficult performance, its heaviness is counterbalanced by folk songs, dance (choreographed by Sarah Blanc), and even mind disco – moments when you appear attentive while your thoughts dance far away.
Brilliantly interweaving her autoethnographic experience with urgent concern for the environment, Bog Witch avoids heavy-handed philosophical preaching. It is equally sensational and emotional, elevated by Lewis Gibson’s delicately layered sound design and Tom Parkinson’s lyrical composition that merges seamlessly with the show’s folkloric atmosphere.
One uncanny moment arrives when Kimmings discovers herself pregnant. Pregnancy has long been a recurring theme in her work. In I’m a Phoenix, Bitch, she performed cabaret-style songs celebrating the joy of motherhood, while the live camera exposed her unease, anxiety, and disorientation. Here, she appears equally at a loss, but at the same time also overwhelmed by the awe of “nature’s gift”, and those contradictory feelings converge into an uplifting, transcendent melody.
Cut off from her lifelines of Deliveroo and Selfridges, Kimmings neither blindly criticises consumerism nor naively romanticises rural life as a form of self-empowerment. As a city woman, she complains, grumbles, and wrestles with her surroundings on Tom Rogers’s elegantly minimal forest set, filled with tree stumps and branches. Meanwhile, through the changing seasons (beautifully captured by Will Duke’s projection design and Ian Syme’s video design), she embarks on a genuine journey of exploration and negotiation, even with confusion and vulnerability.
After a sequence of emotionally charged and physically stunning choreography, Kimmings eventually arrives at the Council of All Beings. Unlike in I’m a Phoenix, Bitch, where she left the audience helplessly alone, this time she invites us to join, to embody the ecosystem, to be addressed as “human beings,” and to literally hug a tree.
Half a decade on, Kimmings has returned as a more refined artist both as writer and director, who delivers a production of more remarkable craftsmanship and evolved completeness. Some might argue that she’s lost a touch of her earlier ferocity or rebelliousness, that her edges have softened. But don’t dismiss those fleeting moments of mind discos. The noisiness, though no longer the main focus of the show, indicates that she’s still the same restless theatre-maker who cannot stop thinking, questioning, and feeling.
Listings and ticket information can be found here.
