Bryony Kimmings is back from the bog with a pleasant reflection on moving off the grid in the middle of a climate crisis.
According to the BBC and the National Drought Group, more than seventy percent of England is now officially in drought, with no forecast of sufficient rain in sight. Fresh off of a run in London, where record high temperatures turned the majority of the city’s prized green spaces yellow (and, in some cases, saw them catch fire), Bog Witch smartly tackles the question on most people’s minds: How do we city folk live responsibly in a climate emergency?
While the play’s ultimate message is not a novel one and makes for somewhat of an anticlimactic ending, Bryony Kimmings is effortlessly funny and brilliant as ever and pulls so beautifully from her personal life as a mother, woman, and human being that it’s difficult not to root for her – and the oak tree, the barn owl, the frogspawn, the badger, the mackerel, and the mycelium.
After agreeing to move to the “wilderness” (twenty-five minutes outside of Brighton) with her partner and son, she tries her best to fall in love with the romanticized life of living off the grid. Even though it doesn’t all go according to plan, she does learn quite a bit about herself and her relationship to place, the land, and community. This character arc is palpable, incredibly well-written, and, if simple and not entirely unexpected, still moving to witness.
Bog Witch is a great, gentle hug of a reminder that, as much as we might feel forced to make huge changes to our lives amid a climate emergency that is fast-revealing the errors of our relationship to this planet, the changes we ought to be making will ultimately be the ones that reroute our relationship to abundance. Some of us might be content to live in the rural middle of nowhere. Others might want to remain in the city. Everyone will probably still wear clothes from an overpriced company called Toast. And that is all okay.
At one point, Kimmings – who plays all of the characters (until the end) with the kind of energy that only a well-oiled, well-seasoned storyteller can pull off – apologizes to a friend about an off-handed comment she makes about not wanting to turn into a “bog witch.” She explains that she thinks of a “bog witch” as someone who lives so far-removed from reality that they lose touch with it. The moment pinged out to me. I thought of the rise of the tradwife aesthetic. I thought about my own decision to live in a city. I thought of all of the ways in which we’re made to believe that we are separate from and helpless to save the natural world unless we completely commit to it. What Kimmings ultimately concludes, however, is that fully committing to being a human – wherever you are and with all of our little mistakes and quirks and hurts – is the only thing we can do in the face of a widening hole of the soul. We don’t need to be bog witches. We just need to embrace that we are no different from them. Or from the barn owl or the mycelium or the oak tree. And then go from there, together, one step at a time.
Show Listing: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/bog-witch
LISTINGS INFORMATION
Venue: Traverse Theatre
Dates: Aug 8th -30th (excl. 10th, 17th, 24th)
Times: various
Ticket prices: £29/ concession: £24
Fringe box office: 0131 226 0000 / www.edfringe.com
Suitable for 14+