Fleabag

The concept and the presentation are simple.  Fleabag (Maddie Rice) sits on a high stool on a platform and tells us about her life.  It was written as a one-woman show – and it still is.  This mode can so easily become tedious, but Fleabag never does. 

We meet Fleabag at what may well be the nadir of her life to date.  Just about everything’s gone to shit.  Ms Rice creates vividly her bestie Boo, her neurotic sister, the sister’s gobsmackingly crass husband, her blank but pragmatic father, various dud sexual partners, an upbeat customer at her café – and a guinea pig.  (You’ll have to see the show.)  When she gets off that chair, it’s for some very specific purpose, such a need to escape, or when she sequesters herself in a disabled loo to do some sexting – pics of her breasts and vagina – at a boyfriend’s request.  She obliges with a shrug.  It can be disturbing to watch, but, well, it’s funny…

There is some clever lighting from Elliott Griggs for changes of scene: night and day, a cavernous waiting room, the no escape light of the London Tube, and so on.  Occasionally there are pre-recorded voices with which Fleabag interacts, but, really, that’s it.  Ms Rice’s performance is precisely detailed and we sense the close attention and imagination of a director of alert sensitivity in Vicky Jones.

The writing is excellent, firstly in that it deals in specifics and leaves responses up to us.  It is that very clever, difficult thing, a first-person narration where we understand more than the narrator.  We might think, at the start, that Fleabag’s account of the state of things is a rambling collection of disconnected anecdotes, but in fact there is strong narrative structure to her tale: she returns to what she has left aside, and each set-up has a pay-off and the pay off both makes sense and is surprising.  In other words, Fleabag is not just truthful and very funny, it is a skilfully crafted piece of theatre – surely a major reason for its enduring success.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge, a graduate of RADA, but finding work as an actress thin on the ground, wrote Fleabag for herself and performed it at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013.  It was noticed and so was she: winner in Edinburgh for a Fringe First, later a nomination for an Olivier Award, a Stage Award for Best Solo Performance, an Off West End Award for Best Female.  When the piece was taken up for television adaptation by BBC3, she wrote the scripts and again played ‘Fleabag’ – and scored a BAFTA.  Now she’s writing series 2, and has a new show, Killing Eve, premiering in April.  So, she’s just too busy and has ceded the role to Maddie Rice – and with full endorsement from Waller-Bridge and from Vicky Jones. 

And Maddie Rice, a comedy actress, is just right for the role.  Big eyed and with no sharp edges, she has a vulnerability that makes us care, even when what she’s telling us means her Fleabag is self-destructive, her own worst enemy, stupidly – or desperately – promiscuous and that she can be a heartless bitch.

What we get is a portrait of a twenty-six-year-old ‘modern girl’ – a portrait that is rich and detailed and perhaps shocking, and yet, in its way, typical of her generation.  Apparently numerous young women have told Waller-Bridge, ‘Fleabag is me.’  Like the most skilful examples of so-called ‘micro-history’ (an account of as little as a few momentous, significant days), Fleabag manages to be a portrait of its time as well. 

As such, and despite the fact that we’re laughing – at times against our will – right up to the final minutes, it is bleakly sad.  The character Fleabag is intelligent, articulate, weirdly cheerful (a front), unnervingly frank and with keen insight into everyone including herself.  But despite the last, she is helpless.  Sexually, she is both distressingly compliant and complaisant as if in hope that ‘maybe this time…’  Or, ‘Oh, may as well…’  Or, ‘Oh, why not?’  But the connection she seeks is elusive, always out of reach.  The ironic frame of a job interview, beginning and ending the piece, exposes the character in all her isolation.  Just one person on stage, but great theatre.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Richard Davenport