There’s some direct engagement with the audience – and it’s become customary for me to point out that what I really mean is that audience involvement is absolutely not the same as audience participation. Nobody in the audience gets up and finds themselves on stage, willingly or otherwise. A brief show, Petra (Maddie White) nonetheless has her reasons for repeatedly asking what the time is. Alas, I couldn’t personally answer – my phone was off and I don’t have a glow-in-the-dark wristwatch. She’s about to get married, but contrary to the stereotypical late-running bride, she’s early, so she has just enough time to tell her story…
It’s a story in which, as it transpires, she is going to marry a corpse. The logistics of this are glossed over, and suffice to say it’s not a marriage that could be deemed legally valid, or indeed consummated. Petra is also dealing with a bereavement in the family, and if you think that all this should mean some concerns ought to be raised over Petra’s mental wellbeing, the show would agree with you. There’s the ‘intrusive’ (inverted commas mine) voiceover of a therapist (Rachel Burnham) asking questions, noting Petra hasn’t attended all her appointments.
But having worked to establish a good rapport with the audience, White’s Petra then creates a distancing effect of sorts by – wait for it – reading facts and evidence out loud. She interrupts an unseen voiceover, a narrator (Aaron Thakar), who tells – until Petra takes back control, so to speak – the story of Lindow Man, the mummified body of a man buried in a peat bog at some point between 2BC and 119AD.
The rest of Lindow Man’s story, especially what is known and what is speculated, is revealed in stages. She says she has her notes, and while it might well be unreasonable to expect anyone to commit to memory all the details regarding Lindow Man, it should be remembered that this is someone she has a keen attraction to. The story would be better served and told if she interrupted the narrator to say she knows everything that has been discovered to date about him, maintained eye contact with the audience, and perhaps have been more animated than holding a notebook and reading from it with head down allows.
There are deeper questions about grief and love, and whether grief is the price of love. In some ways the show is remarkably unhurried, but as Petra asks once more what time it is, it becomes a slightly overused device to create a sense of urgency. A curious piece of theatre, it seems to raise more questions than it resolves.
Review by Chris Omaweng
What would you do for love? Go back in time? Or look underwater? And how far would you go for answers when the man of your dreams died 2,000 years ago? When the grieving Petra begins to trawl through the lonely marshes of Lindow Moss, she finds far more than she bargained for. She finds him. An experimental dark comedy from women-led Itchy Feet Theatre, Bog Body is a solo piece about love, death, decay and desire: the four are closer than we realise.
Petra – Maddie White
Writer and Director – Jen Tucker
Technician and Stage Manager – Beth Scott
Producer – Itchy Feet Theatre
BOG BODY
Arches Lane Theatre, 30 and 31 May 2025
Edinburgh Festival Fringe, 18 to 24 August 2025
