Fleabag: The Special Edition (NHB Modern Plays)

By Phoebe Waller-Bridge

Celebrate the incredible journey of Phoebe Waller-Bridge's outrageously funny, blazingly forthright Fleabag, from fringe theatre hit to international cultural phenomenon, in this special edition – featuring the original playscript, never-before-seen colour photos, and exclusive bonus content by Phoebe, director Vicky Jones and key members of the creative team.
In 2013, Fleabag made its debut as a one-woman show in sixty-seater venue the Big Belly, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe's Underbelly. It was an immediate hit, going on to enjoy two runs at London's Soho Theatre, national and international tours, whilst picking up prizes including Critics' Circle, The Stage, Fringe First and two Off West End Theatre Awards, plus an Olivier Award nomination.
The 2016 TV adaptation propelled Fleabag and Phoebe to worldwide fame, earning critical acclaim and further accolades including Writers' Guild, Royal Television Society and BAFTA Television Awards. A second series, nominated for eleven Emmys, followed in 2019, along with a sold-out run of the original play in New York.
This special edition was released alongside Fleabag's first West End run at Wyndham's Theatre, London. It is introduced by Deborah Frances-White, stand-up comedian, writer and host of The Guilty Feminist podcast.
'Throbs with a concentrated, combustible vitality… Fleabag keeps all contradictory shards and shades of feeling in play at the same time. That's why it's so gloriously disruptive' - The New York Times
'Never has being a modern woman seemed so painfully funny, brutal, and hopeless all at once' - The Atlantic
'Filthily funny… the character is a fascinatingly complex creation' - Guardian
'Sucker-punch funny... I've never seen a play quite like it' - Scotsman
'It has the pinpoint observational comedy of great standup, the fearless honesty and shamelessness of a raw confessional and the subtlety to draw you in… both gut-bustingly funny and gut-wrenchingly sad' - The Hollywood Reporter
'Filthy, funny, snarky and touching' - Telegraph
'A legitimately hilarious show' - The New Yorker
'Frank and sometimes brutally funny... devastatingly good' - The Times
'Phoebe Waller-Bridge's one-woman show Fleabag is unbelievably rude, astoundingly filthy and she's almost certainly going to go to hell for it' - Time Out
'Penetrating, pitch-black and nastily brilliant' - Metro
'Funny, vibrant, and blunt as a hammerhead' - New York Magazine

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Release date: Aug 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9781788502535

Phoebe Waller-Bridge

Phoebe Waller-Bridge is an actor, playwright and screenwriter. Her first play, Fleabag, premiered at the 2013 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, performed by Phoebe Waller-Bridge herself, before transferring to Soho Theatre, London, for several successful runs, followed by a UK tour. It won a Fringe First Award, the Most Promising New Playwright and Best Female Performance at the Off West End Theatre Awards, The Stage Award for Best Solo Performer and the Critics' Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright. A television version of Fleabag was broadcast on BBC3/Amazon in 2016, again starring the author. It became one of the most talked and written about shows of the year, winning several awards, including a BAFTA for best actress in a comedy. Other writing for televison includes Killing Eve (BBC America, 2018) and Crashing (E4, 2016). Her acting credits include 2nd May 1997 (Bush Theatre), Tribes (Royal Court Theatre), Mydidae (Soho Theatre) and the award-winning film The Iron Lady. She is co-Artistic Director of acclaimed new writing company DryWrite.

Book preview

Phoebe Waller-Bridge

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Chancing Her Arm

Deborah Frances-White

Introduction to the First Edition

Phoebe Waller-Bridge

A Conversation Between

Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Vicky Jones

The History of Fleabag

The Creative Team Looks Back

FLEABAG

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Chancing Her Arm

Deborah Frances-White

Thursday 15th November 2012: the remarkable Phoebe Waller-Bridge walked out onto a ‘stage’ (a platform if we are being generous; a bit of wood if we’re not) in the basement of the Leicester Square Theatre in London. There she delivered the first twelve minutes of Fleabag.

I had known her for almost a year and had admired the anarchic new-writing events she and her partner Vicky Jones had produced through their company DryWrite. I felt she had the kind of electric energy of someone from the Bloomsbury Set, whom people would tell implausible stories about a hundred years after they’d first set London alight, so I was intrigued to see something she herself had written.

With this in mind I asked Phoebe to write and deliver a monologue at our second London Storytelling Festival, produced by my company The Spontaneity Shop. The show was called Flights of Fancy and the theme of the stories was ‘Chancing Your Arm’. I remember overhearing someone throw this turn of phrase over their shoulder on the Tube and decided it would make some fizzy fodder.

Phoebe said no. She said that it sounded like stand-up comedy and that was a terrifying idea. Admittedly I am a comedian and a lot of stand-up comics were performing at the festival, so I assured her in soothing tones that she could do anything she liked. She hesitated: ‘Are you sure it’s not stand-up?’

I chanced my arm: ‘There’s a stool. You can sit down.’

‘Alright,’ she said, ‘I’m in.’

I do not remember why Phoebe headlined the gig, as she felt she had taken a step out of her comfort zone into the direction of stand-up comedy by talking directly to the audience, so in retrospect it seems like we gave her the toughest slot, given that we’d just ruthlessly torn down her fourth wall. I do remember her going on last.

It was a terrific show. Everyone smashed it. Then Phoebe came out and perched on the edge of her promised high stool (which I had brought especially), eyes alight as if she were about to make a hilarious prank phone call. She leaned in to the audience of seventy, as if we were her closest conspirators and confided Fleabag’s raciest secrets: her love of slutty little pizzas, her poorly timed sexual urges, her joy in her own hypocrisies and flaws. Just like Phoebe, Fleabag wasn’t ashamed of the parts of herself that other women had been trained to find embarrassing – she revelled in them. She found them funny. And we found them funnier. The audience were captivated, thrilled and in hysterics all at once.

After the gig, everyone insisted that Phoebe needed to turn this glorious twelve minutes into a show. We wanted to spend more time with Fleabag, as if we might somehow catch her spirit and adopt her soul as our own.

The first time I saw the full-length show (the text of which you are holding) directed by Vicky Jones for the Edinburgh Fringe, Phoebe came out with Fleabag’s gleeful improperness spilling over from the stage into the musty stalls of the Underbelly. But this time there was a new depth in her eyes and dimension in her fingertips.

I felt something open up inside of me while watching her. We didn’t have to loathe our kinks. And we didn’t have to be in the ‘zero fucks’ club either. There was a more truthful, meaningful place to find if we could live with the discomfort. Fleabag was wildly crashing about, but it seemed she had accidentally led us somewhere saner than we’d ever been. Phoebe Waller-Bridge, her wiser creator, knew exactly where she was taking us all along.

Fleabag hatched in 2012, and debuted in 2013, just as the fourth ripple of feminism became a wave. Laura Bates created Everyday Sexism. Chimamanda’s TED Talk, ‘We Should All Be Feminists’, went viral. Lucy-Anne Holmes started No More Page 3. Bridget Christie won the Edinburgh Comedy Award for A Bic for Her. It was a time throbbing with possibility for women who wanted more and better. It was then that Fleabag emerged sticky with afterbirth, the wriggling, squealing icon of a feminist counter-culture. One hallmark of fourth-wave feminism is women harnessing the power of the internet as a tool of resistance. Fleabag uses it to feed her pornography addiction and order fast food. Her public admission that she’d trade five years of her life in exchange for the ‘perfect body’ is the ultimate ‘I’m a feminist but…’

Fleabag is as sex-obsessed as any Don Draper, as self-obsessed as any Tony Soprano, and as thrilled with her own transgressions as any Walter White. Fleabag’s primal scream to feminists is that she is the human deep inside each woman, when the burdensome luggage of gendered expectations is stripped away. She is our hunger to be desired, our desire to be adored and our mistakes that cannot be erased by a million pencil-rubbers. She is our lust, our hypocrisy and our painful longing to be better. Fleabag is the underbelly of our feminism, which is just as real as the

Reviews for Fleabag

[lethalmauve · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I wasn’t able to catch the play at a theatre obviously because I live in faraway lands. There were no screenings near me either but I managed to find a copy somewhere; and fortunately a bookshop near me sold the play in print. Other than visiting another country for vacation last May I think watching Fleabag is the only other good decision I made this year. And this year has been rough. I saw the series twice but the play itself is still an experience. Whilst it only covers the first season, with parts rearranged and altered to fit the theatrical structure in minimalist fashion, it also hits very hard. It made me laugh and cry that afterwards I knew I just have to read it again. It would be an understatement to say Phoebe Waller-Bridge is brilliant both as a writer and an artist. We all know that. She created perhaps one of the most complex and resonating female characters out there. We all know that too.What makes Fleabag unforgettably exceptional and wonderfully painful is how it does not brush off female angst, which it vividly captures, as mere mood swings nor as a “millennial, post-hysteria syndrome.” Indeed it is a persistent condition that ails women—accompanied by delightful period jokes brought by Fleabag—that stems from a lot of societal norms and expectations smeared with bias and bigotry.With all the passive-aggressive exchange, draining stoicism, and emotional restraint, all done in delightful British accents, Fleabag portrays trauma and guilt at its most bare levelled by humour raw enough it stings like tequila without a chaser down your throat (and you’ll take another shot then another and another…) But most of all, here is a flawed character that doubts herself, does not really value herself but also has confidence. Here is someone who does not allow herself to swing through the crutches of bereavement nor create meaningful relationships with people but also has empathy and kindness. And someone who deflects and copes, shuts down and walls up, through momentary pleasures, in this instance the use of sex and masturbation, either without a flick of an emotion or to numb an emotion ("I masturbate a lot these days. especially when I'm bored. Or angry. Or upset. Or happy"). She then is further embraced by a dysfunctional family kept together mostly for show each with their own personal issues. And a dead best friend, her only friend, who intermittently shows herself in dreams and memories. It is deliciously catastrophic yet surprisingly loving. But most of all, there is a desperate plea for validation and attention; Fleabag, our protagonist, accepts them in any form to alleviate a certain kind of loneliness. And I think for most of us who also feel like this, do it like this, we end up trying to get that from the wrong people. We think we only deserve that when we deserve better.Despite this write-up making it sound like a house haunted with miseries, Fleabag is ingenious without preventing itself to have fun. At the end of both the play and the first season, hope is glimpsed through admittance and willing one’s self to finally feel. A theme much more explored in season two where a particular human connection appears without being searched for, Fleabag The Play, together with the series, will definitely be something I will revisit from time to time as life goes on; not only because I see myself out there but it can somehow be a source of comfort as well. It makes you want to keep going and makes you less frightened of being vulnerable. Sometimes it's all that matters."People make mistakes.""Yes they do.""That's why they put rubbers on the ends of pencils.""Is that a joke?"“I don’t know.”I believe there is a Fleabag in all of us. And at the end of the day, we all just want to be loved. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s the most logical inclination in fact.