By Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Directed by Vicky Jones
*I write about plays from a writer’s perspective. Please note this means my blog posts contain spoilers.
Fleabag is a one-woman show about an emotionally dysfunctional millennial who uses sex to fill an inner void.
I never managed to see Fleabag live in any of its runs – first at the Edinburgh fringe, then two runs at Soho Theatre and a UK tour. I was away for most of this final run in the West End – billed as the last ever time Phoebe Waller-Bridge will perform it. So I spent several days this week refreshing the Delfont Mackintosh ticket website every half an hour or so, until I finally got one of the not-quite-so-expensive returns (still way more than I would normally pay for a theatre ticket). But as Fleabag is a cultural phenomenon, a feminist landmark even, I couldn’t miss the opportunity to see it live. I especially wanted to know what is was about the play specifically, rather than the TV show, that made it so wildly successful and popular.
The story of Fleabag is every young theatre-maker’s fairy-tale. Waller-Bridge was two years out of drama school with only one credit to her name. She set up a theatre company, Dry Write, with her friend Vicky Jones and she wrote Fleabag. It went from Edinburgh fringe play, to having a run in Soho Theatre. It got picked up by BBC3 and went on the become a cult TV show. At every stage, Fleabag punched above its weight but was still produced in not-the-top venues. Despite that, it was public adoration that catapulted it into a global hit. The second series of the show was on prime time BBC1, as well as on Amazon Prime internationally. It’s been showered with awards and accolades. And now, finally, it’s got a West End run. It’s the dream scenario that 99.99% of young aspiring writers and actors will never ever achieve.
So what accounts for Fleabag’s success? As I sat in my over-priced seat waiting for the show to start, the air was thick with anticipation. Everyone in the audience was clearly a die-hard fan and desperate to see Waller-Bridge in the flesh. They were ready to laugh/cry/render their garments the second she walked on stage. And laugh we did, for the full hour and ten minutes.
But even though it was hilarious, as expected, I was sitting thinking “why did I pay so much to see a one-woman Edinburgh show?” Because that is essentially what Fleabag-the-stage-play is, a one-woman Edinburgh fringe show. And while seeing such shows at the fringe for £5 is fun, why was I paying so much for this in the West End?
Let’s break it down into some of the aspects explored in Playwriting. Structurally, Fleabag is not particularly original or inventive. It opens and closes with a job interview. This is a good way of drawing the audience in, because we all know what a job interview is like. Fleabag is flustered because she is late, which immediately grabs the empathy and memory of the audience. The initial job interview is funny because she’s unintentionally inappropriate and the company she’s interviewing for can’t hire any women because it’s been recently rocked by a sexual harassment scandal. So the set-up is already comedic. But in the final scene, after we’ve discovered Fleabag’s story, the job interview has a poignancy and a sense of tragedy that we weren’t previously aware of. We’re seeing the same scenario through different eyes. Again, this isn’t a new device, but it’s cleverly done because the comedy is so heightened and the tragedy is so heightened, that when they come together it is explosive.
The rest of the play is a series of scenes telling the story of what happened the week before the job interview. Each scene is set piece – meeting a potentially sexy stranger on the tube, a feminist lecture with her sister, waiting on customers at her café. Many of the set pieces have the feeling of an anecdote you tell your friends about a bad date you’ve had or something funny that happened at work, but amped up for maximum comic effect. The scenes are tied together by the overarching story – the story of how Fleabag ended up being such a mess, which we find out is because she slept with her best friend, Boo’s, boyfriend, and then Boo killed herself. Fleabag, who presumably already used sex to fill an emotional void, is wracked with guilt and turns her behaviour up to the max. The structure, as a series of set pieces, can feel a bit formulaic. You know that as Fleabag moves on to the next tale that something unexpected, funny and possibly a bit gross will happen. So the structure is not what makes the play successful. Rather, it’s characterisation.
Even though the only actor we see on stage is Waller-Bridge, there are multiple characters in the play. The other characters are either played by Waller-Bridge herself or are voice-overs. What was unusual about seeing the play now, after the TV series, was that all of these characters have now been played by someone else and have been developed far beyond the initial stage show. So when she mentioned a character – say Martin, her brother-in-law – the audience already had an image in mind of what this person looks like and who he is. There was often a slight laugh or sigh of recognition from the audience when a new character was introduced. Some of the characters changed somewhat in the move from stage to screen. Martin, for instance, is Scottish in the play and American in the TV series, and he has a threatening, dangerous presence in the play, whereas in the TV show he is more pathetic.
What is so successful about the characterisation in the play is that each character has a fad or quirk. In Playwriting, Stephen Jeffreys argues that it’s a good idea for one or two characters to have a fad or quirk, but not all the characters as this would be too much. In Fleabag every character has one. But it works. This is because the fads and quirks are so varied and weird, and yet they are utterly convincing and believable. The variation comes from the fad or quirk being something about the way a character looks (the date’s tiny, rodent mouth), their likes and interests (Boo’s obsession with guinea pigs), or their personality (Martin’s sexual harassment, Clare, his wife’s acceptance-through-gritted-teeth of it, or Joe, a patron of the café’s relentlessly sunny disposition). If every character had a strange look or interest or personality, it would be predictable and repetitive, but the variation, the surprise and the originality insures against that. It takes a skilful observer of character to be able to pull this off.
Another successful aspect of characterisation is the way the constellation of characters is used. Each character Fleabag encounters brings out a different aspect of her personality; the way she behaves as a sister, daughter, best friend, casual lover, girlfriend, café owner, interviewee. In most of the interactions, Fleabag is relatively mean or selfish. She’s most likeable when she’s interacting with her best friend, Boo. So when we discover that Fleabag slept with Boo’s boyfriend, it makes it all the more devastating. Fleabag’s relationship to Boo is clearly the most important in her life. This is highly relatable as many people experience their relationship with their best friend as vital; the relationship in which they fully can be themselves without any fear of negative consequences. Fleabag is not the only mean and selfish character. Most of the characters are, except Boo, who is sweet, loves her guinea pig Hilary, and is beautiful. She’s the only person Fleabag has nice things to say about. She stands out in a relatively cold world as the best person around, again heightening the tragedy of her death. The other character who reveals the overall coldness and loneliness of Fleabag’s world is Joe, the café customer. When Fleabag takes off her top and offers to have sex with him, he recoils, shields his eyes and asks her to put her clothes back on. Even though most people in Fleabag’s hemisphere are out for themselves, Joe shows that not everyone conforms and agrees with this worldview. He adds a softness, providing contrast to the cynicism and pessimism that surrounds her.
In terms of Fleabag herself, she violates three of Aristotle’s four criteria of character. First, Aristotle thought characters ought to be “good” meaning “morally elevated”. Fleabag is morally bankrupt. Whereas Oedipus, when he realises what he has done tears his eyes out, thereby holding himself accountable, Fleabag carries on as normal after she sleeps with Boo’s boyfriend and Boo kills herself. She certainly feels torn apart by guilt about what she did to Boo, but she doesn’t do anything to try to make amends. What makes this so original and challenging, is that women characters are almost always “good” in plays and film. Even if the male characters are bad, the women come along and show them the way through their empathy and caring natures. Occasionally plays and film depict a woman who is unfathomably bad – a serial killer for instance, or Medea who kills her children – but Fleabag doesn’t go so far. She’s bad on a level that women can actually relate to. She’s not caring, she is empathetic but doesn’t act on it, and she knows what she should do to restore relationships and save her business but doesn’t do it. She’s bad in that she’s lazy and self-centred – qualities that are never normally associated with women in fiction, but qualities that women secretly feel (or maybe know) that they harbour. Fleabag gives voice to something we’re not normally allowed to talk about. She expands what is possible for female characters to be.
Second, Aristotle thought that characters should be “appropriate” to their task. Fleabag fulfils one of Stephen’s interpretations of appropriateness – she is ill-equipped for the task and fails. This can go two ways. It can be funny – like Mr Bean, who can’t do anything right. Or tragic, like Malvolio’s inability to pursue his love for Olivia in Twelfth Night. Fleabag combines the two. Her incompetence at friendship, love relationships, and running her café is funny. But it’s also tragic. Her incompetence leads to the suicide of her friend, the breakdown of her relationship with her boyfriend and family, and the demise of her business. Not only is this tragic, but it’s relatable. For women in our era particularly, we tend to be wracked with imposter syndrome. Fleabag is imposter syndrome writ large. We feel that we are ill-equipped for our tasks in work and relationships, and are constantly worried about being proved right. Fleabag is woefully ill-equipped and fails. She fulfils our worst nightmares on stage right before our eyes. It’s funny, painful and cathartic.
The third aspect of character is “lifelike”, meaning that that character should “fit their reality”. This is the aspect of character that Fleabag does fulfil. Even though she’s extreme, a young woman who watches porn, sleeps around, and flakes out at work, is believable in the current context. She feels real.
The final aspect of character is “consistent”. Characters have to be both consistent but not predictable. And importantly in a play, they should change but in a way that is believable. Fleabag does not change. In the final scene, after her disastrous start in the job interview, she has a moment of searing honesty and the employer gives her a second chance. We think she has to succeed here. This is a company that can’t hire any women. She’s a woman, she’s got a job interview, she has to get it. Instead, in response to a comment about her CV she says “Fuck you”. Fleabag has failed to learn anything and carries on with her self-destructive behaviour. If anything, the change in Fleabag’s character happened before we meet her – when Boo committed suicide. What we witness is the aftermath, and her inability to move on. Again, this is refreshing. We’re so used to characters changing at least in subtle ways, that when a “bad” character who is a failure continues to fail and almost glories in it, we’re shocked and enthralled.
So Fleabag’s success as a stage play, I think, boils down to its unusual treatment of character, and a treatment of character that speaks directly to this generation. Being bad, a failure and having a “fuck you” attitude taps into something many people secretly feel about themselves and don’t have an outlet to discuss or reflect on. Even if people don’t feel this way about themselves, it’s so new and startling to see this character captured on stage (and screen) that it’s shocking and exciting. Especially since she’s a woman.
And there’s a final reason why I think Fleabag hit such a nerve. Fleabag is the “zeitgeist play” of its generation, just like Shopping and Fucking in the 90s or Look Back in Anger in the 50s. It taps into what’s happening in our culture right now. The deep sense of imposter syndrome is one aspect of that. Another is our relationship to porn and sex. Fleabag blurts out to her potential employer that she doesn’t feel alive unless she’s fucking and she’s ‘been watching people fuck for as long as I’ve been able to search for it’, and she’s terrified of losing her looks because then she’ll have nothing. She says ‘Either everyone feels like this a little bit and they’re just not talking about it, or I’m completely fucking alone. Which isn’t fucking funny.’
The sense of disconnection from sex and from self, of using sex to connect with oneself but ultimately feeling completely alone, is something that many people experience in our pornified culture. Whereas previous feminist plays about porn verged on preaching and hand-wringing about the dangers of porn for men and its indirect impact on women (something like Sarah Daniels’ Masterpieces), Fleabag recognises that women as well as men consume porn, that they get something from it, but that ultimately it leads to total disconnection. It’s a more modern, relevant and up-to-date feminist take on porn, sex and relationships.
Another more universal theme, rather than being connected with our time in particular, is Fleabag’s guilt over Boo’s death. Socrates said it is better to be harmed than to do harm, because the person who does harm has to live with themselves. Hannah Arendt, building on Socrates, says that the person is two in one; they are in constant dialogue with themselves. Therefore, ‘if I do wrong I am condemned to live together with a wrongdoer in an unbearable intimacy; I can never get rid of him.’ Fleabag can never get rid of herself and her unbearable mistakes, and neither can any of us.
So, while I resented paying so much to watch a one-woman Edinburgh fringe show in the West End, as the show progressed I realised it was worth it. Fleabag captures something fundamental to our time and all times, by portraying a broken, messy failure of a woman who cannot live with herself. It’s a play and a performance that will stay with me for a long time to come.
Fleabag plays at Wyndham’s Theatre, London until 14 September 2019.