REVIEW: Bog Body - Buried Voices, Subtle Unease

©️Bog Body, Kelly Powers Photography

Horror is having a quiet resurgence, not only in film but increasingly on stage. At this year’s Camden Fringe, Olivia Cordell presents Bog Body, a smart, quietly unsettling one-woman show featuring an animatronic bog mummy.

Set in the vaulted, subterranean Barons Court Theatre, the atmosphere is naturally eerie. A white-shrouded figure rests in the corner of the stage as Dr Alyssa Kim, a forensic anthropologist, begins what appears to be a formal lecture on a newly unearthed bog body - a two-thousand-year-old corpse preserved in peat. These archaeological discoveries are real: hundreds have been found across Northern Europe, often marked by signs of ritualistic or violent death.

Directed by Emily Hawkins, the piece is framed as an academic talk, with the audience cast as fellow researchers. This device allows Cordell to move fluidly between character and commentary, blurring the line between performance and presentation. As the lecture progresses, its polished surface begins to crack. Private thoughts and fragmented conversations slip through, and a quiet sense of unease begins to settle in.

Dr Kim invites the audience to share stories of their own scars, both physical and emotional. The piece shifts from wry humour into something more reflective.

The script is poetic and restrained. Lines about the body’s resilience and fragility echo throughout, drawing a delicate line between past and present, personal and historical. “The body heals itself, until one day, it doesn’t,” Dr Kim tells us. But this is not horror in the traditional sense. Rather than leaning on fear, Bog Body lingers on inherited trauma, the silence that surrounds it, and the way history continues to live in the body.

In the final moments, the mystery at the edge of the stage is finally revealed. The figure beneath the cloth is not grotesque but sculptural — skeletal, abstract, still. Dr Kim reaches toward it and says, “What’s your name? I’m listening.” It is a quiet, powerful act of recognition. And with that, the performance closes not on terror, but on connection, an acknowledgment of what we carry, and what we have yet to name.

★★★1/2

https://camdenfringe.com/events/bog-body-a-one-woman-show/

Credits

Writter & Performer: Olivia Cordell
Director: Emily Hawkins
Developed and produced by Audrey O’Farrell
Stage Manager: MJ Jiménez-Silva
Lighting Designer: Ben Wendel
Sound Designer: James Christensen
Projection Designer: Ezequiel Romero
Prop Artist: Libby Morris
Robotics Engineer: Sean Tracey