Fleabag

A filthily honest monologue for the eighties' lost generation

★★★★★
theatre review (edinburgh) | Read in About 2 minutes
Published 17 Aug 2013
33328 large
100487 original

Whilst some perfectly good Fringe shows are hindered by being staged at the wrong time of day in an unsuitable space, Fleabag feels as if it was made for its evening slot and dank, underground venue.

An hour of one woman sitting under a spotlight delivering monologue could be painful, but it comes out plain brilliant. Phoebe Waller-Bridge deftly handles the task of speaking apparently as both herself and as her stage persona. At different points hilarious, pitiful or just plain dark, she holds the audience's attention from start to finish.

She obsesses about being a bad feminist, "sexting", familial breakup and the twilight world of London's directionless twenty-something army of middle class lost children. It is all beautifully tragic and brutally honest. It has a self-awareness which saves it from self-indulgence, and Waller-Bridge's stage self is both entertainingly unusual and terrifyingly typical in a very human way.

At one point she wonders whether she is all alone in her little crisis or just one of many thinking the same thoughts as she moves from home to tube to work to bar to someone else's bed. She isn't. Fleabag is a heartfelt voice for the children of the eighties as they float around trying to make sense of the world. This is why the humour sticks, with its tales of a very modern mix of fatalism and hedonism sustaining a merry-go-round of broken dreamers.

Hyper-real, brilliant and pleasingly shambolic.