Ten years ago, Phoebe Waller-Bridge perched on a stool and delivered a line about having a massive arsehole in a manner that was precision-engineered to make the audience gasp and laugh. It worked on me. It clearly worked for other people, too, because the show, Fleabag, staged in one of the cave-like spaces of Edinburgh’s Underbelly Cowgate, spawned a global TV sensation. The rest is fringe history.
Fleabag is often held up as the epitome of fringe success stories, though the reviews at the time were relatively mixed. There were some glowing responses but the Guardian was not alone in giving it three stars. Nevertheless, the show, which had the backing of Soho theatre, received a Fringe First award and, crucially, came to the attention of the BBC.
In the years since, a mythology has built up around the show. Waller-Bridge has remained a champion of fringe artists, with her Fleabag for Charity scheme and as honorary president of the Fringe society since 2021. This year 50 companies and artists received bursaries thanks to her Keep It Fringe fund and she has been in Edinburgh supporting artists and posing for selfies with delighted performers.
But a decade on, has Fleabag’s success been for the greater good? Or have there been less positive repercussions after the show’s success? For a long time critics couldn’t stop talking about the “next Fleabag” in a way that may have been constraining for other women writing frank, funny solo pieces about their messy lives.
This is something Elle Dillon-Reams is acutely aware of: she is returning to the Edinburgh festival fringe this year with HoneyBee, a show that won her the Scotsman’s best newcomer award in 2019, as well as a new piece called Meat. As a female artist, she has felt the pressure “to fit in and be the shape that people need me to be”.
Increasingly, she is trying to resist that, to find a form and mode of expression that feels true to her. For Dillon-Reams, it’s poetry. HoneyBee is described in the fringe programme as “Fleabag meets Kae Tempest, with a dash of dirty bass” and is as much an exercise in spoken word as theatre. Dressed in a sequined playsuit and sticky with glitter, Dillon-Reams plays a young woman on a festival bender, with a stomach full of cider and “a nibble of a pill”. She gives a kinetic performance in which her character veers from quickies in the portable toilets to Mooncup insertion anxieties, getting increasingly wasted as the night wears on.
The show came out of a time when Dillon-Reams felt as if she was surrounded by young women whose “mental health was frazzled”. She wrote it with the hope that it would make people in the audience feel a bit less alone. “Even if only one person comes away feeling that, that is enough.” Though the protagonist’s night becomes ever more chaotic as the show progresses, it ends on a note of hope.
Dillon-Reams is full of admiration for Waller-Bridge’s work and her support of artists at the fringe. However, as a young woman making work in a thematically, if not formally, similar vein, she says it can sometimes feel as if the industry has decided it has already ticked that box. There was interest in turning HoneyBee into a TV show but ultimately it was decided that it was a little too close to Fleabag. She says she was essentially told: “We’ve got one, we can’t have another one.” This is something that is rarely said of men, she adds. “Nobody is saying, ‘We already have a straight white cis male telling jokes about the fact that he can’t pull.’”
Eleanor Hill’s blurb for her show Sad-Vents says it “makes Fleabag look like CBeebies”. It started out as a web series during the pandemic, when Hill was having mental health issues and struggling to access the support she needed. So she started recording monologues on her phone that eventually evolved into a project called the Sadvent Calendar, during which she released one video every day in the run-up to Christmas. This became the basis of her current fringe show.
Sad-Vents does not just touch on themes of sex and trauma, it plunges headlong into them. It is at once very raw and technically ambitious. While the original Fleabag, directed by Vicky Jones, was as low-tech as it gets, with a single stool as a prop, Hill’s show has 681 tech cues, ambitious for a fringe show. Audience phone use is encouraged, too. “People can take photos, videos or livestream the whole thing if they want,” Hill says.
Ring lights surround the stage, as Hill films herself throughout, her phone screen projected on to the back wall creating a hall-of-mirrors effect. The show is feverishly intense, taking the form of a breathless confessional in which Hill’s protagonist discusses the death of her mum and a toxic relationship with a married, older man called Tony. Nothing is off limits, from nipple-sucking masturbatory fantasies to cannibalistic dream sequences and even a surreal interlude in which she contemplates suicide by squirrel. On more than one occasion the audience gasps at the emotional chaos on display. “It’s a fun game to play. Where does the line lie for different people?” says Hill.
American actor Kristina DeGiovanni’s show The Temp is coming to the fringe for the first time, selling itself as “Fleabag meets Office Space for the post-Great Resignation era”. It sets its sights on US workplace culture and DeGiovanni is still finding her feet when we speak, adjusting to the hustle required to get audiences through the door.
In the show, she portrays an actor who is employed by a company called DataPuke to play a media analyst in an effort to inject some pre-pandemic energy back into the office. She doesn’t need to actually be able to do the job, she just needs to look as if she is doing it. It’s an acting gig, and she treats it as such, going method. This is the basis for some American office caricatures, which DeGiovanni sinks her teeth into.
“It felt as if we didn’t have a workplace comedy that speaks to this point in time,” she says. “During the pandemic we told ourselves that the toxic relationships we have with work were going to have to change, our priorities were going to shift … and then they didn’t. Work is exactly the same. The incentives are the same. Capitalism is the same. We just talk a bigger game about self-care.”
DeGiovanni decided to reference Fleabag in the show’s publicity blurb because it’s a shorthand. People know what it is and it stops her needing to explain, which is important at the fringe. It’s reductive, she says, but being a slim, white woman with dark hair means that comparisons are going to be drawn, so you may as well lean into it. “I feel comfortable doing that because the material is so different,” says DeGiovanni.
She feels that the Fleabag effect may be fading. The tropes of the genre have become familiar enough for Liz Kingsman to send them up deliciously in her One-Woman Show, last year’s fringe hit which transferred to the West End and New York. That show was directed by Adam Brace, the respected director and dramaturg who helped shape many recent comedy hits and who died earlier this year; poignantly, he also provided the voiceover of the interviewer at the start of Waller-Bridge’s original stage show.
A lot has changed at the fringe in 10 years. It was never easy, but it has become increasingly financially challenging, with costs rocketing. Hill has worked out that “even if I sold out every single show that I do, I will still make a loss of £2,958”. Dillon-Reams is also mindful of the financial strain. “While we are living under a Tory government that doesn’t see the arts as being more than a nice little hobby, we’re not going to get marginalised voices at the fringe.”
Fleabag’s shadow is long, but it is easy to appreciate why. It encapsulates the dream that so many people bring with them to Edinburgh and the hope, however small, that their show might explode – that the fringe might be the beginning of something huge.
• HoneyBee is at Pleasance Courtyard until 27 August. Sad-Vents is at Underbelly Bristo Square until 28 August. The Temp is at Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose until 27 August.
