I’m a Phoenix, Bitch

Bryony Kimmings’ well-travelled show – from recent Brisbane and Melbourne Festivals and sell out runs in London and Edinburgh – must really take it out of her.

She’s specialised in autobiographical performance art that previously unearthed dark subjects like her own trail of sexually transmitted diseases, her concerns about tween culture, and her boyfriend’s depression. 

But this one pulls the scrabs off an horrific post-natal depression and psychosis in 2016, the breakup with her partner and the near death of their grievously ill baby.  

Luckily, she’s got a sense of humour. At the beginning at least, she has a stand-up comic’s confidence in rendering all her self-doubts.  A deep male voice, her inner critic, scoffs at her throughout the show. 

But the laughs dry up and Kimmings and co-director Kirsty Housley turn instead to an impressive artistry to tell this gothic voyage.   A model with small figurines stands in for the creepy Oxfordshire cottage expected to be the love-nest; and Kimmings skips through various artful mini sets with a camera projecting her image above, as she sings satirical poppy songs (by Tom Parkinson) mocking the presumed bliss of the earth mother, and our presumptions about sex vamps and mad women.  At times her mental disintegration in that cottage becomes delicious film noir horror.    

Will Dukes’ fine projections then get more ambitiously 3D as Kemmings runs through haunted forests and topples down ravens. A true chameleon, she is always changing costumes, looks and posture.  

Distanced perhaps by all this inventive playacting, I was more in awe of her mental anguish and experience than moved by it … except for the redemption which comes, necessarily, at the end.   But the stirring images of I’m A Phoenix linger on and women applauded loudly.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Victor Frankovski.