Bryony Kimmings On Turning Taboo Life Experiences Into Performance Art

Bryony Kimmings describes her new show, I’m A Phoenix, Bitch, coming to Melbourne Fringe and Brisbane Festival this month, as “a kind of emotional rollercoaster of a one-woman show that you both laugh and cry at, and is kind of epic in the way in which it tells a female story”. 

Kimmings is known for her provocative and ultra-personal theatre shows: “A lot of my life has been like, 'How do I turn this into a show?'”, she quips. In 2016, she collaborated on a musical with Brian Lobel, The Pacifist’s Guide To The War On Cancer. With former partner Tim Grayburn in 2015, she created Fake It ‘Til You Make It, a show about Grayburn’s struggle with depression, while in 2010 she traced the origin of an STI in her one-woman show, Sex Idiot – each of which toured to MICF. 

I’m A Phoenix, Bitch, which last month won the inaugural Popcorn Group Writing Award at Edinburgh Fringe, explores Kimmings’ experience of post-natal depression, the breakdown of her relationship with Grayburn, and their son’s diagnosis with infant epilepsy. It could end up being quite a dense and distressing piece of theatre – except that Kimmings makes a point of balancing heaviness with humour. 

“I try my best to push the laugh as far into that story as humanly possible,” Kimmings says. Then, even when the work reaches its darkest point, she’ll undercut the moment with one-liner jokes. “By doing that, you kind of allow the audience to take a breath and kind of say, ‘She’s ok, we're talking about the past.' I try my best to make everything funny, until it's not possible to laugh at it anymore.

“[The audience] have to fall in love with me, they have to trust me, and they have to like me, but also they have to feel like it's ok to laugh about things in this space.” 

When her son, Frank, was very sick, someone on Twitter joked that “soon enough, you'll make this into a show”. Kimmings was at first disturbed by the suggestion that she could reap some kind of financial benefit from her son’s illness. 

“When I was kind of over [my depression] and was living life again without living in a constant state of trauma, I realised that a lot of my female friends had had post-natal psychosis, post-natal anxiety; a lot of my friends have got disabled children and I was like, 'We do not talk about this.' 

“If I make shows about my own life and this is the life experience I'm finding really frustratingly stigmatised and taboo, then there's no way that I couldn't write the show about it. I would've been a fake if I didn't allow myself to go, 'Ok, how do you dramatise this? How do you make something good from this?' 

“And, 'How do you warn other people that these things happen without ruining the procreating gene in everyone?'” Kimmings laughs.  

To get to the point where she was ready to make I’m A Phoenix, Bitch, Kimmings says she first found the tools – with help from her therapist – to start admitting that she was in a “post-traumatic stress cycle”. A long research and development process involved “just crying and processing a lot”, and getting permission to write the story from Grayburn, but helped her to make the show in a way that was “safe for everyone”. 

“I wouldn't have done it if I'd have kept crying and not stopped, but there was a point where I was like, 'Ok, I'm ready,' that I just felt naturally.” 

The story, while seemingly niche, of a “neurologically unwell child and a mother who loses her fuckin’ mind”, is at its core about being a parent, and about being a child – a universal experience. 

It’s also about being reborn. Kimmings worried that the idea of her as a phoenix, rising from the ashes a different person, was too cheesy, added the provocation 'bitch' to the title to “take the edge off the worthiness”.

“[A kind of rebirth is] happening to all of us all the time – why should anyone care any more about my phoenix moment than anyone else's? I kind of felt like I had to send it up, and also to make people listen, you know?” 

I’m A Phoenix, Bitch first opened in London late last year. Playing back-to-back shows where she “fucking rip[s] open [her] heart and show[s] it to people” admittedly took its toll on Kimmings.

While performing in Brighton for the Fringe in May, she didn’t enact the kind of self-care she needed to cope with constantly reopening that “wound”. “I felt really anxious and sad,” Kimmings says. "I'm a tough old boot anyway, and I'm working class and we don't mess about. But I hadn't put the stupid, weird self-care things in that I still find really cheesy and annoying that I do every day.” 

Returning to Brighton for a repeat season, she worked with her therapist to “put some hippy dippy things in place to make sure [she was] ok”. That involved reminding herself that she wants to do this every day: “I find it helpful for my mental health. I find it curative for other people's mental health. This is my job and I love it.

“I do quite a lot of visualisations, I do lots of deep breathing, I allow myself to say, 'This is gonna be hard, but it's over [soon], and you're doing it for a reason, and you want to be here.’ And then at the end of the show, I also have a little ceremony for myself, which sounds really cheesy, but actually it's really helped to put it in its box.” 

People who connect with I’m A Phoenix, Bitch have reached out to Kimmings after seeing the show, just like they did following Fake It ’Til You Make It. But the artist doesn’t see responding to their emails or tweets as burden. 

“I'll take the time to say, 'Ok, tell me your story. What happened? How are you? Are you getting all the help you need?' 

“I feel like you see a lot of work where people rip open a wound, they fucking bleed on the stage, and then they don't even think about the fact that someone in the audience might be triggered or need to talk about that thing. And there's no aftercare, and that bothers me. It's really rude to not make that a two-way thing.”

She hopes people who have had similar experiences to her own come away from I’m A Phoenix, Bitch feeling like “they’ve had a cathartic experience”, while people who may not have firsthand experience of her subject matter leave  “understand[ing] people and humanity a bit better”. Overall though, Kimmings says the aim is for people to “laugh and to cry and be together”. 

“I hope people feel entertained and moved. Because, you know, what is art if it's not something to make you feel emotionally kind of stimulated and entertained?” 

Kimmings’ next project is the Paul Feig-directed Last Christmas, which she co-wrote with Emma Thompson. When The Music speaks to Kimmings, the first trailer had dropped mere hours before, and the writer is brimming with excitement. Still, she insists she’s not allowed to tell us anything about the flick dropping in November this year. “It's such a beautiful film that I'm not ruining it for anyone,” Kimmings says. 

Kimmings jokes that her own mother didn’t quite believe her when she said she was co-writing the screenplay with Thompson. She gushes that she loves Christmas and about how excited she is to have been able to write a “dysfunctional” woman, played by Emilia Clarke, into the Christmas movie canon. 

“She's got mascara all under her eyes, she's a total idiot, she doesn't hold any punches when it comes to what she says to people – I just think this is brilliant. She's a real bloody woman. And she's just gonna be fucking great. You're gonna love it.”