Bryony Kimmings’ one-woman play charts her journey through the seasons of one year, from big city life to small country bumpkin village-dwelling. She intertwines imagery of her new abode with a spiritual and gut-wrenching sense of un-belonging, prompting her viewers to question exactly what it means to feel unwanted in the spaces that they physically inhabit.

Before the show even begins, Kimmings first invites audience members onstage to help with “set-up”, ‘planting’ trees at the rear of the stage and spreading black sand across the floor. We are immediately subsumed into the making of her world, one of co-creation, highlighting not only our collective responsibility for the environment, but also for each other. Sara Ahmed’s utterance, ‘Feminism: the act of picking each other up’, rings so obliteratingly true here; she is kind to the audience, guiding us through her story with care and consideration–our hands in hers.

Now tracing her descent from harvest sun into the gloomy fog of winter, we watch as Kimmings grapples with her new reality, away from Jo Malone, Deliveroo and air-fryers. Her use of mystical music, extravagant costumes, and minimal set dressing, paired with Jane Eyre-esque projections and fever dream-like lighting, further amplify the witchy world in which she finds herself displaced. Kimmings plays with irony, theatricality, and wit like a child with too many toys, stating that she detests stereotypical notions of becoming a Waitrose-loving woman living in the countryside one moment, before soon re-surfacing on stage adorned in an intensely floral maxi-dress, loud bonnet, and several wicker baskets. She commands the stage with erratic brilliance, casting a spell over us all.

Although she is just one woman on stage, presenting a fresh take on nuanced experiences of ‘eco-weekenders’ and ‘the council of all beings’, Kimmings speaks for many of us. I found parts of myself in her clumsy dancing, outrageous expressions, and grief-fuelled epiphanies. She maps, so clearly, such a trajectory into becoming in an unlikely setting, that I felt myself easing into it alongside her.

Finally, there’s the bog: a vast swamp she describes outside her farmhouse window, which envelops anything around it. ‘A dark place. A void. A place to throw the bodies… For the bog is a place we should all fear’. Possibly a physical manifestation of the black hole she describes feeling in her soul. And it isn’t until she jumps feet first into this bog that she finds it isn’t so scary after all.

So, what is a bog witch? A bog witch is someone that peels away the fear attached to sadness and chooses to sit in it. A bog witch is still terrified of the sadness anyway. A bog witch is full of contradictions. She is messy and witty, depressed yet joyful. She ‘smokes fags’ and ‘drinks whiskey’. She is a mother. She feels the immense heaviness of the world around her: of Gisele Pelicot, the people of Gaza, fast fashion, Donald Trump, and the world burning. She doesn’t know how to put the fire out. She is a white woman with privilege and a roof over her head and love in her home. ‘She is nature and nature is her’.

This play felt like a religious experience. It felt like being dropped into the middle of nowhere and returning home all at once. If I could give it six stars, I would. I absolutely adored it.