How often do you watch a TV series where a profound moment comes from a story about a boy putting a pencil up a hamster’s bum? Probably never, unless you’ve seen Fleabag.
For the uninitiated, Fleabag is Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s one-woman show about a twentysomething who uses casual sex and indiscretion as a foil for the ungraspable sadness that she feels inside. Sounds jokes, I know. But it is, trust me. Having been turned into a brilliant six-part BBC Three series, Fleabag returned triumphantly to the stage, selling out its Soho Theatre run in ten minutes.
Fleabag was striking and disarming because it was honest. Too honest, really. That was one of the signs that the woman telling the story was a bit broken. One minute she would tell you about a one night stand in frank and graphic detail, the next she’d be talking about when her best friend accidentally killed herself. Fleabag wants to admit something, but she’ll lead you up a trail littered with some of her most personal moments on the way, diverting us from the truth with too much truth.
No one has really called Fleabag a ‘confessional’ piece of writing. That word often feels a bit pejorative – a snarky way to preface Lena Dunham’s entire oeuvre, or to dismiss the sort of personal blogging that can quite often land women a book deal. Perhaps Fleabag avoids this label because it’s a character, not Waller-Bridge’s life story. Maybe it’s because there’s a darkness and a directness to it; by no means is Fleabag fluffy.
One thing seems obvious though: confessional, personal writing for the stage generally comes from women. Talking about life’s intimate moments, feelings of shame or insecurity, or just reflecting on profound relationships has been something that women have done, whether that be Fleabag, Clara Brennan’s beautiful library tale Spine, Deborah Pearson’s startling work about time and growing up, or Isley Lynn’s honest and hilarious story about a girl who grows up terrified of sex. In 2017, Fleabag's director Vicky Jones will follow up their success with a new play of her own, Touch, a show about 'the secret life of a 33 year old woman'.
It’s hard to think of writing by men that shines a light on vulnerability in this way, that reflects on how one’s interactions and behaviour work in the world around them. All that springs to mind for me from the last few years is Jack Thorne’s Stacy, the story of a call centre employee who regularly interrupts himself, a plain and normal guy who has actually done something really awful.
It’s thrilling that a work about a woman’s internal life is being so well-loved, and not being dismissed as A Woman Thing, or just something about feelings and vaginas. There’s been an inherent sexism in the way that personal writing from women has been regarded – always something minor, too psychological. You only have to think about how Sylvia Plath’s name remains synonymous with her mental health for some people to know that this is the case.
There’s something that Chris Kraus wrote in her boundary-pushing novel I Love Dick that pinpoints what the problem is: “No matter how dispassionate or large a vision of the world a woman formulates, whenever it includes her own experience and emotion, the telescope’s turned back on her. Because emotion’s just so terrifying the world refuses to believe that it can be pursued as discipline, as form.”
Seeing men embrace this form feels like the place that we need to go next. Men do a lot of the talking already, I know – they are the majority of our politicians, journalists and scientists. They have already written a lot of plays. But do we need another play about history and politics from a man, or do we need a man talking honestly about the things that scare him the most about masculinity? About how on earth he is going to bring up his daughter? About the mistakes he’s made, or the times he’s cried, or the things that have just made him feel really, really embarrassed?
One of the things Grayson Perry reminded men in his recent book, The Descent of Man, is that you can’t die of embarrassment. The central character in Fleabag knows that all too well, and underneath her bulletproof shamelessness lies her real story. Men keep being told in a slightly mollycoddling way that ‘it’s time for them to talk’. When it comes to the stage, they already talk plenty – Fleabag makes me think perhaps they should talk differently.
Fleabag is at Soho Theatre until December 16; sohotheatre.com
