“We’re going to die here. We’re going to be raped and die,” Fleabag’s sister says as the two women enter an unfamiliar house in an isolated area. “Every cloud—” Fleabag shoots back.
That punch line, about rape as a silver lining, is the sort of nasty zinger that some of us adore: a dirty joke with a feminist backhand, using shock to slice through anxiety and anger. It’s a particular specialty of the BBC series “Fleabag,” created by and starring the glamorous thirty-one-year-old British playwright and performer Phoebe Waller-Bridge.* At just six episodes, the show is a precision black-humor mechanism, a warped and affecting fable about one single woman’s existence. The clever editing—cutting off jokes mid-beat, staying close to our antiheroine’s face during sex—is both vaudevillian and elegant. There’s no mumblecore improv here, no folk-pop urging us to feel. Instead, the dialogue is as mordant as a Joe Orton play, and just as dirty; after the opening sequence, which features a last-minute anatomical change of venue, you could easily imagine switching the title to Orton’s nastily anagrammable phrase “Prick Up Your Ears.”
Fleabag (the name is never explained) introduces herself at first as a woman in control of her own story: an urbane singleton, living in London, who beds whom she chooses, dropping wisecracks in the midst of the act. Visually, Waller-Bridge resembles a nineteen-forties femme fatale (soot hair, brick lips), and she often contorts her face in curlicues of amused disgust—she’s like Rosalind Russell, bravado in slacks. But cracks quickly appear. Fleabag compulsively turns every situation sexual, pulling off her sweater semi-accidentally during a job interview or fondling a random cucumber. At one point, she flirts with a dog. But, while she continually sizes, and picks, up men, her libido feels punishingly theatrical—she’s addicted to the “drama” of sex, its awkwardness and cruelty, detumescing intimacy whenever it emerges from the bedsheets. (Her private desires are more outré: she masturbates while watching Obama speak about democracy, as her boyfriend sleeps next to her.)
The truth is, no matter how many men Fleabag sexts with and seduces, it’s women that she is really obsessed with, starting with herself—she’s both repulsed by and drawn to the way that femininity is a sick competition, a system that she keeps helplessly trying to game. Smartly, the show makes us part of that game. As Fleabag narrates, she tilts her head confidingly to break the fourth wall, or whispers a quip from the corner of her lipsticked mouth. (When her brother-in-law calls some fancy shoes “chic,” she says, “Chic means boring,” and then side-eyes the camera and adds, sotto voce, “Don’t tell the French!”) Such moments turn the viewer into Fleabag’s new best friend, with whom she’s trying to share a private story about the origins of her pain, the details of which unfold gradually in a subtle narrative striptease. Early on, Fleabag confesses to her father, her voice cracking, “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.” “Well,” her father says, pausing slyly. “You get all that from your mother.”
Fleabag has reasons to be miserable: her tiny guinea-pig-themed London café is failing, and her stepmother is a manipulative creep. She’s broken up with her cloyingly goody-good boyfriend. And she’s at odds with her sister, Claire, her mirror image in female trouble—when Claire tries to hug her, Fleabag is so confused by the gesture that she whacks her in the face. Crucially, Fleabag is also mourning a lost friend, Boo, who keeps reappearing in lovely, delicate flashbacks. These brief scenes reveal a two-woman world of soul mates who truly get each other’s sensibility, drinking and sharing private gags, huddling up against a hostile world that views single women as both threatening and pathetic. Without Boo around, sex has become a hard drug: it’s the way that Fleabag blots out her uglier memories, and it’s also the way that she relives them.
As with a show like “BoJack Horseman,” the more painful themes of “Fleabag” would be difficult to absorb if it weren’t for how legitimately hilarious the show is: smutty-giggly, caustic, observant about the ugliness of both sexes, and occasionally surreal. In one bravura sequence, Fleabag is commuting on the tube and she looks around, gazing at her weary companions, fellow-passengers and citizens of London, a motley variety. Then, suddenly, the passengers begin to convulse in seeming laughter: their jaws drop, they throw back their heads, they clutch their sides. As music throbs, it feels like an unexplained hallucination: Are they laughing at her? In agony? In ecstasy? Are they even really there? Then Fleabag stares straight at us. “I think my period’s coming,” she announces, deadpan.
In another scene, Fleabag gets into a bubble-filled bathtub with a gorgeous pickup, who is intent on them getting to know each other via a deep-talk Q. and A. “When did you realize you were so good-looking?” she asks him. “I knew I was different when I was about nine,” he tells her, in a basso voice of beautifully profound narcissism. “But shit got real around eleven.” “Shit got real?” “You know . . . aunts got weird.” She nods at him sympathetically, but then, in a small wink at the camera, widens her eyes at us, astonished at the absurdity of the entire exchange. She’d rather share the joke with us than with him.
Many of the sharpest sequences feature the bickering and bantering between Fleabag and her sister Claire, played by the magnificently restrained Sian Clifford. Whereas Fleabag is a slovenly failure, Claire is an uptight martyred corporate success, married, with a stepson. “It’s really inappropriate to jog around a graveyard,” her sister scolds. “Flaunting your life.” While Fleabag is selfish and chaotic, Claire is pathologically selfless and choked by her need for control. (She even insists on planning her own surprise party.) Their dialogue is a chord struck from contrasting styles of feminine masochism, but the two women do share some issues. In one episode, both attend a feminist seminar. A dignified older woman (played by Waller-Bridge’s mother) asks the audience, “If you could lose five years of your life to have what society considers the perfect body, would you?” Everyone else stays still, but Fleabag and her sister shoot their hands straight to the ceiling.
Fleabag’s brother-in-law, played with sinister brio by Brett Gelman, of “Married,” is a charming drunk whose flaws mimic her own. “He’s one of those men who is explosively sexually inappropriate with everyone but makes you feel bad if you take offense, because he was just being fun,” she says, either unaware of the irony or just furious that he can get away with it, as a married man, while she’s left exposed by similar behavior. The ensemble is topnotch, including Olivia Colman as the stepmonster and Jamie Demetriou as a hapless, logorrheic, funky-toothed but somehow lovable documentarian whom Fleabag meets on a bus. Even the props are well cast: when Fleabag steals a gold statue of a headless woman, the statue transforms into a symbol of something—power, weakness, creativity, money, family secrets, you name it—and gets passed hand to hand, a lubricious hot potato.
“Fleabag” appears at the crest of a years-long wave of bad-girl comedy on cable; it’s both a welcome phenomenon and one that, for viewers trying to choose new shows, can feel like an embarrassment of bitches. You may think you’re weary of septic comedies of human pain, feminist comics working blue, and graphic sex scenes—all prevalent trends. The word “antihero” has certainly become a turnoff. But Fleabag is an original. She’s at once a mischief-maker and a figure of pathos. (In a sense, her closest analogue is that tragicomic asshole Larry David.) By the final episode, which I won’t spoil but which touches on themes of forgiveness, her story feels richer than many dramas. In those closing sequences, “Fleabag” turns a trick worthy of Gypsy Rose Lee herself, exposing the merciful story that’s hidden many layers beneath the cruel one. ♦
*The show is now on Amazon.
