There she is alone on a bare stage in a tiny theater: a willowy Brit telling cheeky, deeply personal stories about vagina selfies, guinea pig cafes, and terrible job interviews.
Six years ago, that stage was set at Edinburghs sprawlingly democratic Fringe Festival, where it won over audiences and took home aScotsmanFringe First award.
Starting this week through April 14, a virtually identical run begins Off Broadway at New Yorks Soho Playhouse, a 178-seat jewel box in downtown Manhattan.
Credit: © Joan Marcus 2019
Now, though, there are Hollywood luminaries sprinkled throughout the preview audience (Adam Driver, Zachary Quinto), major names in the Playbill (Broadway giant Daryl Roth and indie film magnate Megan Ellison are among the listed producers) and its sole writer and performer, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, is an international name in her own right: an actress with everything from aFleabagtelevision seriesto aStar Warsfranchise on her resume not to mention major accolades for penning and running the debut season of the breakout female-assassin dramaKilling Eve.
Which is to say that in the interim Waller-Bridge has become a beloved and far better known commodity, and so has her story.
And that can sometimes make seeing this iteration ofFleabagfeel a little bit like staring through the wrong end of the telescope if only because its main plot points were so cleverly, trenchantly expanded on the series (which returns to the BBC next month and Amazon Prime stateside May 17, with special guest spots from the likes of Kristin Scott Thomas and Fiona Shaw).
When Waller-Bridge introduces her tightly wound older sister or her passive-aggressive godmother-turned-stepmother onstage, its hard not to picture the great actresses who play them onscreen: Sian Clifford and freshly-minted Best Actress Oscar winner Olivia Colman, respectively.
Or, when she describes a silent flirtation with another commuter (or as she memorably calls it, eye-fing on the Tube), not to think back to the actual dialogue between her and actor Jamie Demetriou, who took the mans tiny rodent mouth to another level, prosthetically.
But the heart of the show, in any medium, is still Fleabags love for the dearly departed Boo the loopy best friend who flung herself into a busy bike lane in the misguided hopes of getting a cheating boyfriends attention, and accidentally ended up dead.
Waller-Bridges portrayal of her grief, and the slow onion peel of her role in her friends silly, terrible death, is still affecting here, even if it feels like the first seasons six episodes had much more time to let that narrative arc breathe.
All of these nitpicks are moot, of course, if you havent seen the TV show, though hardly anyone in the room on this particular night seemed new to the material.
Still, they laughed and cheered on cue at every gleefully filthy riff on anal sex and bad brothers-in-law and masturbating to Zac Efron, and sat respectfully rapt when she turned a more serious lens on the psychic pain and self-loathing that drives nearly every decision her character makes.
If thisFleabagsometimes feels a little like its all happening in air quotes, its still a brisk (only 65 minutes!
), clever, and indisputably engaging evening of theater, performed at a level of intimacy that most Phoebe Waller-Bridge fans now legion can only dream of in 2019.B+
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