Venue: Traverse Theatre
Date: Friday 28 August
Rating: ★★★★ (4/5)
Reviewed by: Eileen Inglis
The last time I saw Bryony Kimmings on stage, she was heavily pregnant and performing a show with her then-partner about his struggles with depression. I thought it was about six years ago. It turns out it was eleven!
So, I was pleased to discover she’s back in Edinburgh with her latest autobiographical production, Bog Witch. I knew it had an environmental theme; I didn’t know it was also about her own experience of clinical depression.
At the beginning, Bryony tells us she has a hole. After the obvious sexual joke, we discover it’s a hole in her soul. In the city, she tried to fill it with online shopping, partying and dating apps. Then she meets environmentalist Will, falls in love and moves with their two children to a farm in the Sussex countryside.
Will and the children love rural life. Bryony hates it.
The silence is deafening; she has no friends, and Will’s complicated environmental ideas send her internally into a full-blown rave. When she eventually admits how unhappy she is, his suggestion is to take a walk in nature.
What stayed with me most is the idea that you can meet someone you love, build a family and create a new life together, but none of that necessarily fixes whatever was hurting in the first place.
Bryony is a brilliantly engaging storyteller, mixing songs, physical comedy and sharply observed mockery of the linen-wearing, Toast-shopping, white-people-with-dreadlocks world she finds herself in.
But as the seasons pass, through joy, grief and unexpected turns, her relationship with the people and landscape around her changes. The environmental ideas she initially tunes out become more urgent as she becomes more aware of her own consumption and the natural world around her.
The staging is simple but effective. Abstract images of trees, animals and changing seasons fill the back of the stage, while a small black circle of soil grows as Kimmings empties sack after sack around it, turning her metaphorical hole into a physical chasm.
Bog Witch isn’t suggesting that moving to the country or taking a walk in the forest can cure depression. It’s messier, funnier and more human than that. It’s about the things we use to fill our holes, the people and places we don’t expect to need, and finding belonging somewhere we never expected to find it.
