Bog Witch Review – Bryony Kimmings is back with a haunting and funny climatic account | stage

IIt may contain a brief moment of actual tree-hugging, but this lively solo show by Bryony Kimmings – her first in five years – is part of a sophisticated and adventurous new wave of environmental theatre. Such as the recent audio experiment conducted by the Royal Court Al-Baqarah | The deer and musical comedy Hot Mess, opening this month at Southwark Playhouse, Bog Witch finds new and compelling perspectives on the familiar and horrific plight of our planet.

From season to season, Kimmings recounts a year of turmoil after moving to a permaculture home with her son, partner, and daughter. It’s the tale of a town mouse shivering nervously in her new wilderness, cut off from Deliveroo and Selfridges. At times, Kimmings’ opening mix of stand-up comedy and songs, plus his constant feline sidekick, suggests a kinship with Katie Norris’s “Killer Farm” comedy.

But with full control, she turns the evening from wisecracking to simple wisdom about climate catastrophe. She captures those everyday feelings of helplessness amidst global neglect, when you realize, for example, that a simple sandwich from the supermarket has logged more air miles than it has. Elsewhere, she expresses her bewilderment at a local harvest festival that only accepts pre-packaged food items.

If the story is progressive, it is also deeply embedded in time, as Kimmings continually discovers ancient roots such as those of the great oak tree she is considering cutting down for a better view from her new home. English folk traditions of music, dance, craft and horror are intertwined in the show and story, which also contains a Watch With Mother -style narrative about the progress of “poor Bryony” and stormy diversions into the territory of The Wizard of Oz and The Wicker Man.

Aided by Lewis Gibson’s sound design and Tom Parkinson’s compositions, simple pursuits or bucolic vistas are reworked by Kimmings’s mounting anxiety and rocketing environmental awareness so that a bit of felting turns into an angry stab-fest and a seemingly verdant landscape is reclassified as desert. In a production she co-directed with Francesca Murray Fuentes, the tone is confessional, self-deprecating, and sometimes like a cry for help. One scene where she has to answer to her son because of her climate imprint has the perfect blend of comedy and gut-wrenching horror.

Kimmings’ images are characteristically funny – her new acquaintance in the countryside has a daffodil-shaped face and “a house like a hobbit’s vagina” – while her body, in the production designed by Sarah Blank, is more assertive. Will Duke’s projections, Jay Hoare’s lighting, and the work of animators Raf Vartanian and Nathan Verney combine with a woodcut effect, and audience participation is brilliantly handled.

As befits her new country life, Kimmings is constantly hard at work, wearing a variety of homespun outfits and busying herself with tasks on the simple, evocative Tom Rogers set, with its borders of fragile-looking tree trunks and branches. Themes of hauntings and witchcraft are presented in both playful and dark ways throughout, from Naomi Klein’s theory of the shadow self to a creepy group of local mothers.

It’s exciting to see Kimmings return, as her vision fills the massive stage of this wonderfully restored theatre. This is a climate account of cosmic and everyday proportions – and a theatrical time capsule of the way we live now.