Bryony Kimmings’ new show – her first in five years – was created to celebrate the opening of Soho Walthamstow, the previously neglected Art Deco beauty that’s now one of London’s shiniest venues. She uses every bit of its vast stage to great effect and even manages to get a chunk of the audience on it for its witty epilogue, of which more later.
In Bogwitch – part comedy, part theatre, part performance – Kimmings recounts a year in her life after she and her new partner moved out of London with their blended family to a rundown cottage in the sticks, where they will live off the land. It’s told in four seasonal parts, starting with spring, when she tells us she has “a massive hole in my soul” that needs to be filled.
Kimmings has a sharp observational eye and ear, and some of her descriptions of the people she now finds herself among are razor sharp. There are only two ways women dress in the country, she says; in a gilet or top to toe in TOAST.
She pokes gentle fun, too, at the hippie-ish crowd her eco-warrior partner introduces her too, saying she’s too cynical to be part of their gang, which includes celebrations of Mother Nature where accountants and dentists dress up as animals or trees to speak on behalf of other life forms.
Besides, she says, she frets that everything she likes – including London, to which she occasionally escapes for a city fix – is environmentally unfriendly.
But gradually, she and nature learn to live together, and the huge oak tree outside her home office – a mother oak in arboreal terms, one that seeded all the other local oak trees – gets into her head. First she’s annoyed it’s blocking light from her creative space, but she gradually forms an emotional attachment to it and better understands the cycle of life.
Bogwitch, which Kimmings co-directs with Francesca Murray-Fuentes, has a lot going on – personal story, songs, a nod to folk traditions, an examination of the climate crisis – and Kimmings moves seamlessly between them, scattering jokes and witty asides.
And then, as we move into winter, something unexpected happens in her story, and its impact – because we haven’t seen it coming – is deep.
But Kimmings ends the 105-minute show on a lighter note with a smart callback, an epilogue played out with the help of volunteers from the audience. It’s a delightfully skittish finale to the show.
