In your face, up your bottom, Fleabag is about sex – shedloads of it during a steamy, hilarious and sometimes disturbing hour. Bright-eyed, rouge-lipped Maddie Rice delivers Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s pulsating, award-winning monologue with disarming easy confidence.
The niceties are shredded as Rice dissects her relationship with her boyfriend Harry, her moneyed sister Claire and a raft of casual flings. Fleabag reaches the parts that can be sexted.
The sexual adventures paraded before us appear perilously close to a need for affirmation and self worth, and darkly sometimes for vacuity and narcissism. But the writing is so hot, so snappy, that anyone trying to slow down and internally moralise during the show would just stand to lose a handful of ace one-liners. This is sex therapy, agony aunt and stand-up rolled into one singeingly mischievous and delightful performance.
With just a stool for company, Rice is panting from the off. From the opening ‘inappropriate’ job interview scene she leads us off at breakneck speed to the workings of her guinea-pig themed café business which is on the skids. She muses about letting a banker cough up £10,000 for the use of her backside – maybe she won’t let him, but maybe she just might… prostitution? Here it almost sounds like mere practicality. But that’s just where Fleabag bites. We all love the ribald japes of the un-named narrator, but there is always something sticking in the gullet once we have laughed out loud. Fleabag pulls no punches, it recognises the currency of sex, it revels in the rollercoaster fun of drunken nights and the performance of bodily orifices, but ultimately describes a shallowness, a disconnect. It remains for the unfortunate Hilary the guinea pig to be the sole representative of emotional love.
We ‘meet’ Ginger and white-haired Joe, who both decline to take advantage of the steaming woman giving them the ‘come-on’. This is confusing for our heroine and perhaps surprises the audience, who up to now has been hacking with laughter but then is suddenly stilled by something different. Isn’t it always the man who ‘makes the move’? Does this woman really need to be ravished or taken advantage of in order to feel OK? How feminist is this? Even her dad comes in for some sexual appraisal. “Would he click on me if I was online?”
Waller-Bridge is a voice to be reckoned with. Take note, this woman knows no fear. At a time when post-modernist feminism is battering at The Sun to remove its topless page 3, along comes Fleabag to post us a vagina selfie. You work it out! Brilliant. ★★★★★ Simon Bishop 22/01/15
