Bryony Kimmings begins with a chant, a broom and a problem: a massive hole. “Not my vagina,” she clarifies, but somewhere in the soul. It is the kind of insatiable soul-hole modern life is very good at monetising. Feed it next-day delivery, caffeine, scrolling, tiny dopamine pellets of convenience and distraction. Still it growls.

Bog Witch, Kimmings’ one-woman show, follows that hunger to its least convenient conclusion: a collapsing cottage in the wilderness, where she moves with her small son in the hope that nature might do what consumption cannot. The premise could easily become smug eco-conversion theatre. But Kimmings is far too sharp, too honest and too suspicious of herself for that. She arrives in the countryside as a self-confessed capitalist baby bitch: anxious, performatively compassionate and privately furious that the view is blocked by a 350-year-old oak. There is, frankly, too much nature.

She is a remarkable performer: dexterous, cynical yet generous, able to move between stand-up, song, confession and performance art without losing the thread. Her physical comedy is excellent, particularly in her miniature portraits of rural life and its inhabitants, but what makes the show sing is the accuracy of the self-exposure. We see her trying to be better, failing, trying again, and being appalled by how much effort it takes to care properly.

The design is rich without overwhelming her. A canvas backdrop, standing sticks, seasonal shifts in light and sound. The shadow work is beautiful: animals, foliage, window sills, falling leaves, pastoral images that flicker between storybook and threat. Soundscapes of death beetles, hornet nests and bogland give the piece a damp, humming life. Her musical interludes are perfectly judged, keeping grief, ecological dread and silliness in active conversation.

Kimmings is brilliant on the awful logic of climate anxiety. As soon as you look properly, absolutely every object, habit and comfort seems implicated. The piece understands the exhaustion of trying to be “good” in a world designed to make that almost impossible. It expertly sends up pseudo-rural fantasies, wellness-adjacent reinvention and the guilt of not caring enough, whilst knowing that looking away is its own kind of damage.

Structured around the wheel of the year, the show tracks Kimmings as both the landscape and her thinking begin to change. Slowly, against her will, the bog gets under her skin. What begins as a comic fish-out-of-water story becomes something darker, funnier and more elemental.

It would be easy to give away too much. What matters is how confidently Kimmings holds together an extraordinary range of material: ecological grief, motherhood, loss, consumer culture, witchcraft, comedy and performance art. The final movement of the piece draws the audience directly into its world, turning what initially appears precarious into something communal, generous and unexpectedly moving. This is Kimmings’ particular skill as a theatre-maker. She can take subjects that often produce paralysis or despair and turn them into collective experiences without sentimentality or diluting their complexity.

The reception on Friday night was extraordinary, with a packed Bristol Old Vic audience rising to its feet. It felt entirely deserved. Bog Witch is funny, strange, furious, self-lacerating and unexpectedly hopeful. It begins with a hole in the soul and ends somewhere far more complicated than healing. It understands that transformation is not a clean conversion, but a muddy, painful, necessary crawl back into connection.

★★★★★     Tilly Marshall   6 June 2026