Bryony Kimmings’s new solo show, about her attempt as a consumerist city dweller to embrace an ecologically sound rural idyll, is an admirable and dryly humorous attempt to grapple with the climate emergency that takes her to some bravely personal places. It also appears to be a work in progress, though that may just reflect Kimmings’s practice, which mines the interface where standup, theatrical life-writing and performance art meet.
Either way, Bog Witch is an amusing but sprawling and uneven piece of work that relies on some ponderous audience participation. “You’re not going home till I get 12 volunteers,” she warns, trawling the audience for victims 90 minutes in, having seemingly also enlisted punters at the start to help build the set, of spindly tree-trunks and heaps of soft black soil. For the final section, where the amateurs are dragooned into playing masked facets of nature, haranguing humanity for its selfish carelessness, Kimmings appeared to be reading her lines and cues from a huge, bound script.
