Olivia Cordell brings the fear factor to a museum lecture gone horribly wrong
When I was a child holidaying up to the West of Ireland every summer, I heard plenty about bogs. They were a source of fuel for impoverished rural families for generations, as well as a treasure trove of forgotten gems of ancient Irish history (mostly old butter and chalices), the bog is a place of mystery. What beguiled me most of all were the notorious bog bodies, the mummified remains of humans found across Northern Europe. Most of them featuring the same injuries from blunt force trauma, strangulation, and perhaps most haunting of all, signs of self-defence.
These beguiling remains serve as inspiration for writer and actor Olivia Cordell in the one-woman work Bog Body, playing as part of the Camden Fringe at the Baron’s Court Theatre. Directed by Emily Hawkins, we’re promised some chills, thrills, and laughs.
The theatre space is a suitably dark cavern. We enter to a looping ambient track set on haunted house mode. It wouldn’t surprise me if someone died here of consumption in the 1800s. The action of Bog Body however sees us in the lecture hall of ‘The Museum’. The venue is packed with people all wanting a glimpse of the infamous Kilgarvan Woman, an Irish bog body that has made headlines for carrying a supposed curse. We’re promised some spooks in the piece, but surprisingly it’s Cordell’s awkwardness that draws us into its world — lulling us into a false sense of security.
As we dip into the horror elements the literary tropes begin to sneak in — eerie voices haunt Dr. Kim with nihilistic taunts. However it’s the buildup of anxiety before things kick off that gets our palms sweating. Projectors stop working, rumours of a curse are addressed, the lights falter. All the while the body itself is lying under a white sheet on the stage, an ever present threat. We know that things are not going to get any easier for our nerdy hero. There’s humour in the inevitability of the oncoming haunting. Unfortunately the pay-off doesn’t quite meet the anticipation, some clunky lighting cues and hammy ‘possession’ dialogue interfere with the flow. Though technical issues, as we were told later, were an issue during the performance.
Aside from the horror aspects the play’s focus on exhumation makes for some pretty interesting metaphor building, in fact a lot of the text is well-crafted, at least it feels that way in the hands of the nervously charming Cordell as the flappable Dr. Alyssa Kim. She manages to attach themes of patriarchy, remembrance, and societal structures to the marks and scars on our body with a zeal one would surely only find in the most dedicated of forensic anthropologists. Cordell’s clever writing and charismatic delivery show a great deal of promise. Let’s hope the ghosts of the bogs don’t get her before we get to see what’s next.