No, you’re crying
What did Fleabag do to you?
A record change this week, because why the hell not?
To someone who wasn’t quite ready to look their past in the face and ruefully grin, when Fleabag came into my life, I felt an almost out-of-body floating sense of relief. Here was someone like me. Talks to herself. Check. Thinks inappropriate thoughts most of the time. Um, yep. Finds ways to get what she wants without people realising what she’s up to. Oh hi there *waves*. And all of these things, while they get her in a whole heap of trouble, just make her, her.
It started as a one-woman show in Edinburgh and came to the small screen in 2016, followed by a highly successful live show. More on that later. Breaking many broadcast taboos along the way, including openly discussing periods, female wanking and anal sex, Fleabag tells it how it is.
“I had to do a flash poo in Pret”
I loved the series so much but noticed a lot of the men in my life didn’t get it. I’d hear things like, “She’s too in your face” or “I can’t be doing with her” or even “That’s a programme for girls”. Wow. When they rejected her so summarily, it’s easy to see why I’ve never found a man who feels like the right fit.
(SIDE NOTE for gender parity: there are a couple of guys I’ve found who enjoy it. They’re good eggs. Stop trying to cancel me, Rita.)
As both writer and protagonist, Phoebe Waller-Bridge surrounds herself with a razor-sharp cast. Hugh Dennis is unforgettable as the bank manager who won’t finance Fleabag’s guinea pig café. There’s this moment as she’s escaped a silent retreat where she smokes and listens as he says: “I want to take clean cups out of the dishwasher and put them in the cupboard at home, and the next morning I want to watch my wife drink from them. And I want to make her feel good again. To make her orgasm again. And again. Truly.”
Notoriously music-free, with a two-second jazz/ska sting as the show’s theme, underneath this moment plays The Gloaming’s Allistrum’s March. One scene, about a minute long. No, you’re crying.
As Waller-Bridge’s one-woman show hit the West End and livestreamed into cinemas across the country, screenings sold out thick and fast. Sitting in the cinema waiting for a livestream to start adds an extra layer of anticipation as the audience buzzes in London while you’re sat in the provinces, hoping nothing breaks and that it’s worth £22 a ticket to watch what is, in essence, a large TV.
I wasn’t disappointed. Minimal staging, a solitary bar stool, made it feel like stand-up. And, at times, I was clutching my sides.
But then she takes you by surprise, as she always does, and her bitter words and raw performance spike a hole in your gut.
With such a strong cast, I’ll admit, I was sceptical to see if it worked as a monologue. But that’s where having the writer as the lead player comes into its own. As she writes, PW-B thinks about the way she wants her characters to say something. She knows inherently how to deliver the lines because that’s what she imagined as she wrote them.
As she smoothly flicked her face to left and right, her expression lighting up with different personalities, her accent didn’t change, but her tone did. She brought many of the cast to life sitting there, real, breathing and sweating and laughing and tearing up and making me feel the same way.
That’s the power of live theatre, livestreamed or not. The power to hold you, choke you and make it so you can’t take your eyes off the emotional gamut being run in front of you. And the beauty of the live show means you don’t get any of television’s noisy distractions and you can get lost in the storytelling, even while you hear the audience cackle around you.
For this fucked-up thirty-something, Fleabag struck more than a chord. She made it ok to do what you have to do to survive while being surrounded by wankers. Ok to want to forget, to want to feel nothing while trying to feel something – and to not want to feel alone, even though the things you do push people further away from you.
And to remember that people make mistakes. It’s why they put rubbers on the end of pencils.
For me, Fleabag led to 30 texts from people saying "oh my GOD, Fleabag is YOU!" largely due to the undeniable facial and verbal similarities 🤣
But there were plenty of other similarities that they wouldn't have been aware of too... All that messy stuff we don't talk about and the inner monologue. Genius.
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Flash poos are "emergency poos" (abrv: EPs) in my family tho.