Fleabag: The Special Edition (NHB Modern Plays)

Fleabag’s primal scream to feminists is that she is the human deep inside each woman, when the burdensome luggage of gendered expectations is stripped away. She is our hunger to be desired, our desire to be adored and our mistakes that cannot be erased by a million pencil-rubbers. She is our lust, our hypocrisy and our painful longing to be better.

I would say that the design is the embodiment of the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle, which for the character of Fleabag is perfect in many ways.

’d worked at the Edinburgh Festival in some capacity every year since I was seventeen so was confident I had a handle on how to lay the foundations for a successful show, even if we didn’t know what it was yet: a bold image (‘Let’s put Phoebe in a Batman suit on the roof of a building at 5 a.m. and take a picture for the poster’), the right time-slot (‘Let’s put the show on at 9.30 p.m. so we’re a funny theatre alternative to all the stand-up’), interesting copy (‘Let’s make sure we include the phrases “porny-wank” and “lovely threesome” in the marketing blurb’), the right venue (‘Let’s go to a space with a small capacity so we can definitely sell all the tickets’). I’m not saying that all those things made Fleabag the success it was in Edinburgh, but they definitely gave us a good head start.

Trust your instincts, and don’t panic. These are the two most enduring lessons I learnt producing Fleabag for the first time in 2013.

Whenever I’m reading a new play now, I’ll always seek out that same feeling I had the first time I read Chancing Your Arm, Phoebe’s short piece of comedy storytelling, which eventually evolved into this show. I didn’t know what Fleabag was about, but I did know it was going to be good.

Producing a play which is unfinished is not an easy task – at times I’d go as far as to say it was fully terrifying, especially when, the week before rehearsals started, Phoebe admitted she hadn’t actually written the play yet… In fact, rehearsals were essentially Phoebe writing the play and Vicky dramaturging it. As the producer you have to keep a calm head and I did my level best never to let anyone see how nerve-wracking it was for me – although there is a now-infamous story about the time I visited everyone in rehearsals, cool as a cucumber, left happily and then minutes later Char, our stage manager, found me breaking down in the broom cupboard.

The first series premiered on 21 July 2016; the second series premiered on 4 March 2019.

It was remade in French for Canal+ as Mouche, written and directed by Jeanne Herry, starring Camille Cottin, and premiered on 3 June 2019.

But you and I just saw her as we see each other… as someone we could easily become if we went down a slightly different road or had had our hearts broken in the way she

did. She is desperately trying to convince the audience that she is fine and in control, but the truth is she lost her best friend and no longer has anyone who understands her in the world.

Vicky: Well, you know this character means the absolute world to me. She came from your heart and you had such pity for her and such compassion, but she was so fucking funny and she didn’t ever feel sorry for herself –

Phoebe: And that’s the key!

Vicky: She didn’t have any compassion or pity for herself, she was just funny

Haha okay. It was my first interview about Fleabag and I was so excited. We’d finished the chat and then I was asked to ‘come take some photographs’. Now, we had known from playwriting folklore that if someone asks you to take your photo, there are certain mortifying inevitabilities to be aware of. They will either ask you to sit backwards on a chair, lie down with a leg up or lean moodily against a brick wall with a hand on your face. I had been warned. So far on this shoot we were brick-free and I’d been vertical most of the day. We got some decent photos of me sitting on a bench with my legs up and stretched out, but it could have been worse. I thought I’d gotten away with it. As we were on our way back though, the photographer slowed down. He had spotted a massive, plastic, purple cow in the middle of the Underbelly square. I looked at him. I saw the idea forming, then: ‘Hey

But then… in the interview I talked about how casually women get sexualised in the media and the massive headline over me sitting on the back of this massive purple cow was ‘Horn Star’!!! Way to kick a girl when she’s on a cow.

Phoebe, why don’t you get on the cow?’ I remember thinking, ‘This is it, this is the moment.