Bryony Kimmings’s new solo show, about her attempt as a consumerist city dweller to embrace an ecologically sound rural idyll, is an admirable and dryly humorous attempt to grapple with the climate emergency that takes her to some bravely personal places. It also appears to be a work in progress, though that may just reflect Kimmings’s practice, which mines the interface where standup, theatrical life-writing and performance art meet.
Either way, Bog Witch is an amusing but sprawling and uneven piece of work that relies on some ponderous audience participation. “You’re not going home till I get 12 volunteers,” she warns, trawling the audience for victims 90 minutes in, having seemingly also enlisted punters at the start to help build the set, of spindly tree-trunks and heaps of soft black soil. For the final section, where the amateurs are dragooned into playing masked facets of nature, haranguing humanity for its selfish carelessness, Kimmings appeared to be reading her lines and cues from a huge, bound script.
Again, maybe that’s part of the schtick. Kimmings presents herself as a fool, an unprepared proxy for our own heedlessness, as she runs away from or stumbles into the reality of the climate crisis. “I have a massive hole – please don’t laugh… in my soul,” she begins as a prelude to the first of several comic folky songs, written by Tom Parkinson for acoustic guitar and pipes. In this one she lists the things she used to fill the emptiness inside her, from one-night stands to an air fryer.
Then bingo! She meets Will, a DILF and an eco-warrior. They have great sex and before you know it they’ve moved with her young son and his daughter to a “permaculture-based, off-grid” homestead in deepest East Sussex. To prepare she watches “a documentary called The Wicker Man”.
Cue much fish-out-of-water comedy, as Kimmings tries and fails to adapt to country life in a series of smocks and hoods purchased from TOAST. Animations behind her detail the changing of the seasons (“Autumn – the carrot, the turnip, the swede!”), from which she could insulate herself in town. Here in the countryside there are endless jobs to do, pumpkins to carve and felt to prick. There are also strange lures. In the pub, her refuge, she is inveigled by a massive-bosomed woman called Asta to join a coven of local pagans. Meanwhile, the bog behind the house calls her to muddy suffocation.
With her flat, downbeat delivery Kimmings is very funny on the disjunct between her ego and id. Outwardly she listens, earnest-faced, to Will’s apocalyptic lectures about the state of the planet; inwardly, her “petulant capitalist bitch” is dancing to EDM. She ticks off the kids for fat-shaming the one-eyed cat that adopts them, but on meeting a possible human kindred spirit immediately tells us in an aside: “She’s a bit common. Don’t like her…”
A show about a lone, overwhelmed woman in this grandly reborn 960-seat venue is an apt visual metaphor for the powerlessness humans seem to feel in the face of eco-disaster. Kimmings creates some striking images on this lofty stage, scattering wicker baskets and maypole garlands, before a symbolic storm prompts some rapid changes of gear and tone. An epiphanic moment promises great happiness and serenity, then sudden sadness.
Though lumpy, the audience participation yields unexpected comedy. Kimmings tells us that alongside dreadlocked white women called Aurora or Medusa, the coven also embraces people with ordinary names: only to find she’s recruited people apparently called Alesandor and Daze. That’s Walthamstow for you.
At the curtain call, Kimmings gestured helplessly at her watch and mouthed “sorry” to the audience for overrunning. As a thoroughgoing metropolitan ponce, I liked a lot of this horrified odyssey into the bucolic. But it’ll be better when it’s finished.
Soho Theatre Walthamstow, to Oct 25; sohotheatre.com
