Bryony Kimmings has one heck of a fanbase: some big comedy names have played the 1,000-seater Soho Theatre Walthamstow since it opened in May, but none of them have mounted a two-and-a-half week run, as Kimmings has with new show Bog Witch.
Still, if you’re unfamiliar with her, it wouldn’t be a shock: she hasn’t done a stage show in seven years, and she is ultimately a performance artist (whose only full-on mainstream achievement to date is co-writing seasonal Britflick Last Christmas).
Press-night audiences aren’t representative, of course, but unless Bog Witch is dead the rest of the run, the fans are real. And deserved. Last decade she was an enchanting, amusing and provocative regular presence on our stages, with a run of funny, inventive, deeply personal and visually arresting shows beginning with her breakthrough Sex Idiot (about her efforts to trace which former partner gave her chlamydia) through to I’m a Phoenix, Bitch (a mini-musical about post-natal depression).
Bog Witch is quintessential Kimmings, using funny songs, fun costumes and unfiltered, matey honesty to describe the latest chapter in her life: living off grid after falling for Will, an eco-warrior.
That said, Bog Witch proves disarming in being more diaristic than narrowly focussed on the headline topic. As illustrated by Will Duke’s beautiful shadow puppet-like projections, it’s really about the turn of an eventful year in Kimmings’s life. Of course it’s heavily influenced by her circumstances: making new hippie friends, encountering a coven of witches down the pub, generally attempting to adjust to a sustainable life and deciding whether she wants to be the type of rural mum who wears gilets or the type of rural mum who wears Toast (the only two options apparently). Above all, she spends the year in the shadow of a weird existential eco festival that her sort-of-friend Aster has signed her up to attend, and that forms a handy conclusion to the piece. But without spoilering, there are also major plot points here that are just things that happened in Kimmings’s life, with little direct bearing on the eco theme.
It’s great to see Kimmings strutting back, barely changed (as a performer, anyway), taking this huge new venue by the scruff of the neck for what is technically its first theatre show. Her charisma fills the room, as does some impressive cool tech stuff – a scene set in a massive storm is startlingly visceral thanks to Lewis Gibson’s intense sound design.
Running to almost two hours (way over its official running time), Bog Witch does feel bloated, the work of a star artist returning from a long break with a big budget and little interest in self-editing. The climactic scene set at the festival – which involves the recruiting of 12 volunteers from the audience – is fun but also feels like a forced attempt to have a set-piece ending (it also feels a lot more, er, made-up than the rest of the show). And there are some odd omissions. Will, her partner, is a vague, distant presence. Which is fine but given Kimmings literally roped a previous boyfriend into co-starring in a show (Fake It ’til You Make It), it feels like a surprise that we never learn much about the current one who she changed her life for beyond ‘eco guy’.
It’s on the indulgent side, but it’s beautifully wrought and just generally a joy to have Kimmings back. If she simply documented every year of her life like this, I doubt there would be many complaints from the faithful.
