BOG WITCH - EDINBURGH FRINGE FESTIVAL 2026

BOG WITCH

★★★★★ “Funny, tender and gloriously bonkers Bryony Kimmings makes the personal political and the bog theatrical.”

Bryony Kimmings is a masterful theatre-maker. A consummate performer, storyteller and troublemaker, she takes the raw ingredients of her own life and spins them into a theatrical experience so exquisite it shines.

Bog Witch (at Traverse Theatre) is, on the surface, the story of a woman who has had enough. Struggling with mental health, single motherhood, a sick child, money and the relentless demands of contemporary life, Kimmings uproots herself and her son from the city and moves to a tumbledown cottage in the countryside. Her mission is simple: reconnect with nature and, in the process, find a way to become happy and sane again.

Of course, nothing is ever that simple.

Kimmings is an unlikely eco-convert. She likes shopping. She likes Deliveroo. She likes coffee and booze and all the small, seductive comforts of consumer capitalism. But Bog Witch asks what happens when those things stop filling the hole. What happens when the distraction disappears and we are forced to look at the world we are actually living in?

The themes are big: mental health, motherhood, consumerism, climate anxiety, ecological collapse, grief, our disconnection from nature, and the possibility of changing how we live. But Kimmings never allows the ideas to become worthy or preachy. She is too funny, too self-deprecating and too theatrically inventive for that.

Instead, she gives us songs, stand-up, storytelling, projections, sound, folk traditions, horror, audience participation and a generous dose of the ridiculous. There is something wonderfully primal lurking beneath the comedy. The bog, the woods, the animals and the landscape gradually become more than scenery. They become characters, memories and forces with which that Kimmings reckons.

And this is where her genius as a theatre-maker really kicks in. The raw material is her own life, but she doesn't simply tell us about it. She makes theatre out of it. Her personal anxieties become theatrical images; her experiences become jokes, songs, rituals and stories. She has an extraordinary ability to take something painfully ordinary and suddenly make it strange.

The production is gorgeous. Sound, music, projections and lighting create a world that can shift from cosy rural idyll to something ancient, unsettling and faintly hallucinatory. There is more than a touch of folk horror here - The Wicker Man occasionally seems to be lurking at the edge of the woods - but Kimmings is always willing to puncture the portentousness with a filthy joke or a gloriously ridiculous image.

And then comes the ending.

I won't spoil it, because discovering where Bog Witch eventually takes us is one of the show's great pleasures. It is unexpected, joyful and completely bonkers, with more than a touch of the church hall about it. After all the climate anxiety, existential dread and wrestling with the state of the planet, Kimmings finds a wonderfully communal, celebratory way out. It feels both absurd and absolutely right.

That may be the secret of Bog Witch: it takes enormous subjects and makes them human. The climate crisis is terrifying, but so is being a parent. Capitalism is destroying us, but we still want a coffee. Nature is magnificent, but sometimes it is also muddy and inconvenient and full of dead things.

Kimmings doesn't offer an easy solution. She offers something better: connection, imagination, community and the possibility that changing how we live might also change how we feel.

A glorious return. Funny, filthy, tender, politically alert and theatrically magnificent.

Review by Kate Gaul