Duke of York’s Picturehouse, Brighton
“I’m not obsessed with sex,” Fleabag says, sincerely. “I just can’t stop thinking about it.” Over the course of the next hour and a half, much to the audience’s delight and occasional discomfort, it will become apparent that she can’t stop talking about it either.
Phoebe Waller Bridge’s solo play premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013, and has since been adapted into a hugely successful series for the BBC. It recently cleaned up at the Emmy awards. Following the success of the series, Waller-Bridge decided to bring the play back for a limited run at London’s Wyndham Theatre. Fortunately for the people of Brighton, the show has now come to cinema screens in the city as part of National Theatre Live.
Just like the TV series that it inspired, the play is hilarious, filthy and devastating. We meet Fleabag desperately trying to keep her guinea pig themed cafe afloat following the death of her best friend and business partner Boo. Boo’s childish enthusiasm meant the guinea pig theme “made sense,” we are told. Now she’s gone, the cafe’s just feels “a bit creepy,” putting off all but a couple of intriguing regular customers. In search of comfort, Fleabag usually turns to sex, and she lets us in on every tiny, eye-wateringly intimate detail of her various hook-ups and flings.
Many of the jokes will be familiar to those who have seen the TV series, but this does not matter in the slightest. On stage alone, Waller-Bridge masterfully gives them new life, effortlessly switching into hilarious impressions of lovers and family members. Best of all is her take off of a man she meets on the tube and begins to date, in spite of his unfortunate teeth. ‘Tube-rodent’, as she refers to him, is brought to life for us by Waller-Bridge’s priceless facial expressions.
The staging is sparse to say the least, consisting of a sole chair lit up in the middle of the stage and a couple of voice-overs. Thanks to her wild facial expressions and bodily contortions, however, Waller-Bridge doesn’t need anything else. Her storytelling is so captivating it fills the stage and hypnotises the room.
The audience at Brighton’s Duke of York’s Picturehouse laugh frequently, but are often moved to silence as well. At one point, having brilliantly recounted finding a drunk girl on a tube platform and making sure she gets home when drunk herself, Fleabag moves the tale on to arriving at her father’s house later that same night (her mother has recently died when we meet her). After painfully spilling her heart out to him on the doorstep, she is quickly packed off in a taxi with a £20 note and no words of comfort, not even a hug, in which to find solace.
Waller-Bridge’s remarkable skill is being able to talk candidly about female sexuality, deep trauma, family politics and life’s little stumbling blocks with a blend of excruciating honesty and humour that ranges from the shockingly dark to light-hearted in seconds. Comfortably seated in the wonderfully atmospheric Duke of York’s cinema, this Brighton audience sits mesmerised.
You can still catch Fleabag NT Live in Brighton. It is showing at the Odeon on Monday 7th, at 8pm. Tickets are £18.75 with reduced prices for students and concessions. Duke of York’s Picturehouse also has a number of National Theatre Live screenings coming up, as part of the programmes 15th anniversary.
Featured image: © Duke of York’s Brighton via Geograph.
