By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini
‘I have a horrible feeling that I’m a greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, morally bankrupt woman who can’t even call herself a feminist.’ – FLEABAG.
“Where’d you just go?” – HOT PRIEST. At the heart of Fleabag’s awkward sex scenes, off-hand quips, and family rifts lies this most important question: “Where” is Fleabag going? Often described as a ‘tour-de-force’, the fever and frenzy of Fleabag lies in the show’s refusal ever to stop. Fleabag narrates her own life whilst the action around her continues, rapidly focusing in and out of these two spaces, hanging between the balance of the two. But this constant momentum never falters or halts, seemingly in perpetual pursuit of whichever destination Fleabag is aiming for, regardless of the chaos surrounding the tracks. The confessions of Fleabag still echo – confessions we have taken to be ‘honest’, ‘feminist’ windows of clarity about ourselves, about womanhood under the strain of the 21st century. But, what if Fleabag never tried to “go” to us in these moments of fourth-wall fragmentation? What if we were not just spectators, but Fleabag’s new best friend, or Fleabag’s psyche? Fleabag doesn’t define our role, our role is irrelevant; our connection to Fleabag is the destination.
Bertold Brecht redefined the role of the audience under his pioneering theory of ‘epic theatre’ isolating the audience and manipulating the tether between audience and actor. There is no set power. No set control. In one scene the audience is held by a leash only to be holding the leash over the actors the next. The audience’s perception and jolting of the stage allows for art to be transformed, making it “not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it”. Fleabag’s first televised word is “you”; Fleabag effortlessly seizes you, hurtling you along with her. I have yet to find someone who wants her to let go, who finds her immediate intensity overwhelming. The connection we create with her by becoming “you” is non-confrontational and seemingly natural. We are “you”. But who is “you”? “You” is deictic and cannot exist outside of the context Fleabag has placed it in, thus redefining the audience, not as spectators of her so much, but also spectators of ourselves and how we draw these connections with others. “You” is a role waiting to be filled, reflecting Fleabag’s loneliness, but also the show’s examination of connections. We are an undefined role to her. We don’t exist to her outside the ramblings of her mind. We aren’t her confidants. We aren’t her attempt of rationalising her behaviour through finding a common, shared experience of “you”. We are the glance she gives in the mirror, the raised eyebrows we give when eye contact flits to another. We are figments of her perception and an example of the very extremes of connections.
“I am obsessed with audiences,” confesses Waller-Bridge in her introduction to the play’s script. The audience isn’t trying to be won, bought, or rationalised by Fleabag – our connection with her exists out of a compulsion to distract and input. The original play reads like the fumbling mind palace of post-embarrassment realisation, provoked by flashing a loan manager. Whilst there is no explicit direction to suggest this, the play is split into thirds: meeting the manager, acting as a descent into Fleabag’s mind with the manager just being a voice we hear and process; Fleabag’s inner monologue where time seems to stop as we enter her hysteria; resuming and returning to the manager and the blur between monologue and naturalism. The middle part, which is the main part, is a dialogue with herself where she is frantically self-criticising and searching for the right answer, getting lost in her memories along the way, where she distracts herself from the situation at hand with macabre intrusions.
My attempt at watching Fleabag aged 16 threw me into a spiral of over-analysis. Who was I meant to be connecting with during the dialogue? Where is Fleabag going and where do I break? My countless rewatches of the show couldn’t answer it. With every run I found myself addressing different people and changing the levels of connection I held with the audience, loosening the leash on a line before clinging onto it for dear life the next. There is no clear consistency; you, Fleabag, must decide what information is going to directly connect to the front row. Waller-Bridge wrote a script that rigorously demands you to perceive yourself through connection. The play cannot function without the understanding of it. The realisation is she is not speaking to us, but herself, addressing us as a distraction from the mess and trying to realise which response to her life will make the best connection in order to move forward. In the same way that we can’t make eye contact when stressed, feel the need to fiddle when anxious, or fidget when bored, Fleabag speaks as a way to distract herself. Her mind is boiling over, and we are her thought process and intrusive comments, before choosing to turn the heat off or scream. We are the distraction taking her out of the constant momentum of her life, allowing her to live in her head and her body. We are both being taught by Brechtian whispers about our connections and are being used, obsessionally, by Waller-Bridge’s hunger for extreme connectivity.
“I’m not obsessed with sex. I just can’t stop thinking about it” confesses Fleabag, almost immediately after showing us a racy night of anal sex whilst meeting us for the first time. If Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s intention for Fleabag to explore “power, control, people trying to hold everything together”, is to be realised, this is achieved through Fleabag’s connection with us, and with sex.
FLEABAG -I want someone to tell me what to eat. What to like. What to hate. What to rage about. What to listen to. What band to like. What to buy tickets for. What to joke about. What not to joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in. Who to vote for and who to love and how to…tell them. I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far, I think I’ve been getting it wrong.
Her confession epitomises the experience of operating in extremes. Clinging on to sex, people, whatever, obsessively, acts as a way to find a calling. An honest distraction, a pause, in her life. The sex is complicated, hot, raw, confusing, tender, and tangled much like her connection with us. The hunt for sex is often seen as a game, a mission. Take Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress. “Let us sport as we may” for the victory of pleasure. Pleasure that is won through an art of persuasion and flirting, a series of steps and follies to achieve, a game we’ve knowingly played for millennia. For Fleabag, sex is the final destination, acting as her “someone to tell me” when she has no one.
Fleabag operates in extremes; extreme honesty, extreme connection, the extremes of sex. Fleabag goes from sex as a constant distraction, to celibacy. After a night that left me a confusion of anger, grief, loneliness and fear, I took the same vow, albeit brief. Abstinence, however, cannot miraculously solve everything, and once sex enters your life, it is difficult to get it to leave; that part of yourself grows into a nagging obsession but in a new unrecognisable form of relationship. Celibacy acts as a stopgap for this higher calling Fleabag craves, as it comes with its own rules, regulations, and restraints. A primal direction, like intrusive thinking to the point of dissociation or mindless shagging, to keep you in line. But, for Fleabag, as for me, this change is still a distraction. She repeatedly turns to us, gushing over “his [HP’s] arms” on the way to a Quaker meeting. We are her distraction, her loophole, so that she can explore a new connection, whilst retaining the habits of old connections. We aren’t the connection with a being outside of herself that can “tell [her] how to live her life”, as we are part of her life.
Despite the distraction of sex, Fleabag continues to talk to us during it. The connection is stifled, unable to reach its full potential causing her to connect elsewhere. When Fleabag finally has sex with Hot Priest she doesn’t want to be distracted. She doesn’t want us, actively pushing us away, shutting the door on us as if we’ve walked in. A new, full connection has been formed. One that she wants to wholly cherish and not leave. One she wants to be completely present for. Slowly, we see her cutaways become less frequent during scenes featuring the two of them. She is letting us go, she is not letting her perception and the intrusions of her mind limit her. The connection with us is re-evaluated towards the end of series two, and we see her relationship and use of us change. She isn’t moving on from hijacking us into being her therapist, because we never were that to her, she is choosing to be present, to make lasting connections, and to stop making the most lasting connection and presence in her life the way she responds to life outside of herself. The context of her “you” has changed; we still exist to observe her, but we are no longer invited into the inner sanctum of her mind. To escape the distraction of self-dependence. To teach us to live presently. To “shape” the way we perceive ourselves and our love.
Image from the National Theatre 2019 production poster at Wyndham’s Theatre, London