Six years after its debut on the Edinburgh fringe Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s one-woman play finally gets its West End premiere. In the interim it has travelled the globe, spawned two TV series and garnered shelf-fulls of awards. Seeing it on stage for the first time, I was struck by its subversive method, its inherent sadness and by Waller-Bridge’s mimetic skill as a performer.
Everyone by now has a shrewd idea of who Fleabag is: a woman in constant crisis whose guinea-pig-themed cafe is going bust and who has the capacity to screw-up her sex life, alienate family and destroy friendships. Yet, although her story is familiar, and the first-night playing to a celebrity-packed audience felt like a coronation, Waller-Bridge still has the ability to spring surprises.
At one point she recounts how Fleabag, after seeing a drunk girl home, decides to have a nightcap. When she tells us that “a sweaty, bald man cups my vagina from behind at the bar,” the audience gasps in suitable horror. Yet Waller-Bridge instantly pulls the rug from under us by smiling sweetly as she adds: “But he buys me a drink so – he’s nice actually.”
It is that ability to catch the contradictions in Fleabag’s character that is, I suspect, the source of the show’s success. Waller-Bridge says aloud the things that are normally kept hidden and has created a woman who is both caustic about men and avid for sex. But, although the show is often funny, I laughed less than I expected. Ultimately, it is less stand-up comedy than sit-down tragedy in that it is a study in female desperation. Fleabag craves human contact but her quick tongue and awareness of the absurdity of every situation repels those she would attract.
Waller-Bridge the performer, however, is indivisible from the writer. If I preferred the stage version to the Fleabag of TV, it is because Waller-Bridge is able to populate the stage with the characters of her imagination. When on the tube she meets a rodent-faced guy who tells a story “like he doesn’t want to let the words out”, she screws up her face so that his tiny mouth becomes a minuscule orifice. Equally when she recalls how her cafe-partner, Boo, took music seriously Waller-Bridge’s head does little rhythmical jerks evoking the monastic absorption of those enslaved to a beat.
If she can summon up a character at will, Waller-Bridge also makes expressive use of her body while barely moving from a stool: at one point she contorts her shape to show how she obliged an ex-boyfriend by taking intimate snapshots of her vagina.
Vicky Jones’s production and Isobel Waller-Bridge’s sound design enhance the performance by their essential simplicity and, although the show has been over-hyped, it is still quirky and original. It offers a remarkable portrait of a modern woman who shamelessly bares her soul and in so doing reveals her essential solitude.
