Bryony Kimmings: Bog Witch
Soho Theatre
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Soho Theatre -
Bryony Kimmings has returned, dragging a wheelbarrow full of questions about how to live on a dying planet. Bog Witch isn’t a comeback so much as a reckoning; part stand-up séance, part self-help exorcism, part desperate love letter to a world still clinging on. After five years away from the solo stage, she reappears not polished or triumphant, but raw, damp, and defiantly human.
She tells us about the move to a regenerative homestead with her partner, a hopeful little eco-experiment somewhere in the English countryside. The fantasy of a slower life, of hand-turned soil and solar panels. But what she reveals is something murkier: compost gone to rot, community ideals bruised by ego, the quiet hypocrisy of trying to do good under capitalism. It’s domestic apocalypse, hilarious, horrifying, and painfully familiar.
There’s mud and motherhood, silence and glitter. Moments where it feels like stand-up, folk-song and others where it feels like an exorcism. Kimmings is magnetic and messy, building her own altar out of panic and papier-mâché. She folds us into her contradictions: wanting to save the planet, wanting oat milk and Deliveroo, wanting to disappear altogether. The laughter catches in your throat and stays there.
The design works its own spell, with sound by Lewis Gibson, music by Tom Parkinson, and projections and lighting that shift between comic and uncanny. The stage becomes a living bog, breathing and sighing. One moment it’s a kitchen table; the next, a vision of collapse. The domestic becomes cosmic, the familiar becomes strange.
What lingers is the tenderness beneath all that fury. Kimmings doesn’t preach; she confesses. The guilt, the confusion, the small brutalities of trying to raise a child in a burning world. The work trembles between grief and hope, despair and delight, a folk horror therapy session, a cabaret confession.
It runs a little long, close to two hours without a pause, and you feel that stretch. The energy dips, then swells again, like breath held too long underwater. But perhaps that, too, is part of the spell: endurance as ritual, time stretched until it starts to ache.
Bog Witch isn’t tidy theatre. It’s mucky and alive, like something dug up rather than built. It doesn’t ask to be liked; it asks to be felt. You leave with your chest buzzing and your stomach uneasy, thinking about your recycling, your flight history, your own small rituals of denial.
Kimmings calls herself a witch. Maybe that’s just another word for someone brave enough to look straight at the end of the world and still make something beautiful from it.
Bog Witch runs until the 25th October at Soho Theatre Walthamstow and tickets can be purchased here: https://sohotheatre.com/events/bog-witch/
FOUR STARS
Photo by Rosie Powell.