Theatre review: Fleabag’s scandalous success

Suddenly they’re all at it. Actors, that is, writing plays. David Haig, Rory Kinnear and Simon Paisley Day are all poised to offer new dramas to the public. But someone else has got there first. You may have spotted Phoebe Waller-Bridge playing a secretarial cameo in The Iron Lady. She’s a rangy Home Countries brunette with rosy lips, large inviting eyes and an angular, forthright face that suggests intelligence, amusement and a hint of subversive sexual power. Her immaculate skin is as white as a snowdrop. All in all, she’s perfectly set up for a steady career in frocks and pearls playing Downton gold-diggers and hyperventilating Jane Austen virgins.

But she seems to want more, something wilder, something weirder, from her profession. Her début play, a monologue called Fleabag, is a riveting examination of hedonistic excess in the metropolis. She plays a flighty, rootless posh bird who runs a Bohemian café in London with her best friend Boo. Poor old Boo’s naughty boyfriend has been caught playing around so Boo stages a cry-for-help suicide attempt that goes wrong. Boo dies. This drives Fleabag on a downward spiral of madcap boozing and random carnality. She roams the city’s bars and streets looking for men to bed. Physical allure doesn’t interest her. She’s keen to chat up any rat-faced, ginger-haired, beer-gutted passer-by. Some of her interviewees are carrying bus passes. What she craves is the moment when a man’s eyes change and she registers the sublime affirmation of lust. ‘He wants my body.’

When she fails to pull, she returns to her flat and sates herself with internet porn. Mostly gangbangs. I realise she sounds like a sad little basketcase who could do with a spell as a volunteer in a leper colony to straighten her out.