Variety Review: Off-Broadway's 'Fleabag'

Watching Phoebe Waller-Bridge, as the lead character of “Fleabag,” trying to resist saying something bitingly perceptive, inappropriately funny and completely unexpected is a study of comic expansiveness. And when she can’t contain herself a second longer, she lets loose with a zinger that spares no one — not even, and perhaps especially, herself.

“Is that a joke?” a potentially offended man asks her after she says something wildly disturbing.

After a moment of deep consideration, she responds sincerely, “I don’t know.” And though audiences will laugh uproariously, they may not be so sure either.

In this sharply-told nugget of a play, this unfiltered, sexually obsessed and profane character brilliantly reveals the thin divide between the comedy of lashing out and self-deprecation — and the pain, sadness and introspection that hide within.

Waller-Bridge’s breakout solo show first bowed in Edinburgh in 2013 before playing London and touring, and then became the inspiration for the popular BBC/Amazon Prime series, now in its second season. To judge by the audience’s enthusiastic reception at the hot-ticket Off Broadway run of the stage version, “Fleabag” and Waller-Bridge are equally popular Stateside. (Just to show her range is wide, Waller-Bridge also created the psychosexual spy thriller “Killing Eve.”.)

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In the TV series Fleabag addresses the camera directly, but there’s an even deeper intimacy in this barebones stage show. Here it feels more like a confessional, albeit one in which she is trying to charm, seduce and shock the listener all at once with her bad-girl tales. 

At first, the play and the character evoke the comic brashness and sexual liberation of Lena Dunham’s “Girls.” But Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag has an allure and likability even when she says such terrible — and probably very true — things about her family, her lovers and, of course, herself.