Fleabag: The Special Edition E-Book

Phoebe Waller-Bridge

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Modern Plays
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 93

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

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 followed in 2019, winning an amazing six Emmy Awards (including Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series), along with a sold-out run of the original play in New York. This special edition of the play is 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.

Leseprobe

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 glossy top coat. Her mischievous joy makes it possible to look at our own bloody handprint on the wall and think: ‘It’ll wash off.’

Since 2013 much has happened for Fleabag. The live show has been adapted for television and, over two triumphant seasons, has become a spectacular international hit. At the time of writing, the second season is nominated for a gobsmacking eleven Emmys. It has brought us some outstanding insights into relationships – the purest form of violent adoration that only swells up between sisters; the envious passive-aggression you can actually taste from a godmother-cum-stepmother; the unspeakable desire of forbidden coition with the sexiest-possible priest. Fleabag and her attempts at living a braver life have delivered us iconic moments which have deepened our shared understanding of what it is to be human and what it is to be woman, in a world that is constantly rebooting its feminism.

I have no doubt that Phoebe would have written Fleabag, that it was erupting from inside of her like a volcano, whether I had pressed her to chance her arm that evening or not, but I feel very privileged to have witnessed its first subterranean outing. I will be part of a generation of women who will forever be grateful to Phoebe because she has allowed us to shed a little of our shame each time we revisit her iconoclastic invention. This book is a lovely way to keep some of Fleabag’s lightning in a bottle and, when we need it, in our back pocket.

It seems clear that Fleabag will continue to enchant and embolden generations not even born yet, on the page, stage and screen. I hope this story of its genesis inspires any admirer of Phoebe’s who is hesitant to step into the light and reveal her emotional connective tissue, to pull up her stool and chance her arm, just in case it turns out she’s one of the voices of her generation – and to join the choir of rebels, regardless.

I look forward to telling implausible stories about Phoebe for years to come, that will be retold, ideally with embellishments, a hundred years after she first set London’s West End alight.

July 2019

Phoebe performs the first twelve minutes of what would become Fleabag at the London Storytelling Festival, 2012.

Deborah Frances-White is a stand-up comedian and writer best known for her hit podcast The Guilty Feminist which has had over seventy million downloads and been performed at the Sydney Opera House, the London Palladium and the Royal Albert Hall. Her book The Guilty Feminist is a Sunday Times Bestseller. Her first feature film as screenwriter is the award-winning Say My Name released in the US and the UK in 2019. Her play Never Have I Ever will be produced in London in 2020. Deborah is currently reviving the legendary Secret Policeman comedy brand in a series of shows and events, as both Creative Director and host, for Amnesty International.

Introduction to the First Edition

Phoebe Waller-Bridge

I am obsessed with audiences. How to win them, why some things alienate them, how to draw them in and surprise them, what divides them. It’s a theatrical sport for me – and I’m hooked.

When Vicky Jones (director of the stage play/inimitable genius/excellent friend) and I were producing nights of short plays under our theatre company, DryWrite, we were forever scrabbling for new ways to put the audience in the centre of the experience.

Each experiment illuminated little tricks of how to construct a satisfying story. We would give briefs to writers, challenging them to elicit a specific response from the audience. It would change each time, but one, for example, was: ‘Make an audience fall in love with a character in under five minutes.’ Writers would write the monologues, actors would perform them, and each audience member would express their ‘love’ by releasing a small, heart-shaped, helium balloon at the moment they fell in love with the character on stage.

Each writer could measure their success by how many balloons floated to the ceiling of the theatre during their piece. At the end of the night we’d all then charge to the bar and discuss why some pieces succeeded over others. Whatever the experiment, the audience rarely behaved in the way we expected them to, prompting many fascinating conversations and debates about character, story and language that proved invaluable lessons in playwriting.

Over the years, we put on event after event, experiment after experiment, and at the heart of them were always the big questions about how to affect the audience. How do you make people heckle? How do you make people invest in one character over another? How do you make an audience forgive a terrible crime? There was one I was most intrigued by – ‘Funny/Not Funny: How do you make an audience laugh in one moment, then feel something completely and profoundly different in the next?’

It was this tightrope that I wanted to walk with Fleabag. When we were developing it for the Edinburgh Fringe, I was obsessively looking for ways to surprise the audience, to sneak up on them just when they least expect it.

I knew I wanted to write about a young, sex-obsessed, angry, dry-witted woman, but the main focus of the process was her direct relationship with her audience and how she tries to manipulate and amuse and shock them, moment to moment, until she eventually bares her soul.

Adapting Fleabag for TV meant this same fundamental structure still applied, but experiments with the audience took another interesting turn and Fleabag’s relationship with the audience intensified.