Theatre review by Steve Bennett at the Wyndham's Theatre

So this is how Fleabag bows out, exactly as it began, with Phoebe Waller-Bridge alone on a barstool on a starkly-lit stage, spilling out the warts-and-all story of her funny, flawed, sexy, egotistical, confident yet insecure alter-ego. 

Such is Waller-Bridge’s cultural cachet now that tickets for the limited farewell London run are the hottest in town. Quite how many in the audience will be slavish zeitgeist-chasers and how many will be dedicated fans of the BBC series it is impossible to say, but there is plenty to savour for both sides.

The most obvious difference from the broadcast version is that this is a one-woman show, shorn of the stunning cast that so rounded out the TV phenomenon (though many were in the audience at yesterday’s opening night). Everyone in this story is filtered through Waller-Bridge, giving her impression of them as Fleabag. 

Still, they all feel compellingly real and fully rounded. As on TV, sister Claire is the essential other side of the equation, the repressed, career-driven yin to Fleabag’s chaotic yang. Their relationship, loving but spiky and battered by circumstance, is at the heart of the show. Then there all the inappropriate people Fleabag sleeps with to numb out her pain, awful to a man, in one way or another.

Not quite every familiar character from the TV show is there in all their appalling glory. Most notably, The Godmother, made so intensely fearsome by Olivia Colman, is just a passing presence in a couple of lines.

No wonder this is pared down to the essentials, for the story that made nigh-on three hours of television for the first series is told here in little more than an hour. And quite the plot there is to take in, too, as it explores Fleabag’s complicated relationship with her sexuality, her dead friend and her sister, married to the controlling and ‘explosively sexually inappropriate’ Martin.

It’s an episodic story of one memorable anecdote after another. From the hilarious image of her on-off boyfriend Harry spewing in a gloriously inappropriate manner, to the paralytically drunk girl she helped navigate through London, to the Tube Rodent (a rat-like man she pulled on the Underground) getting spooked by the cafe guinea pig Hilary, in a scene missing from TV. But each vignette is so closely tied to her personality that each bit serves the satisfying whole.

For what has been consistent at every stage of Fleabag’s journey has been the complex, contradictory central character herself – at once sexually confident and emotionally fragile; frank but dishonest with herself; empowered but enslaved by her insecurities. 

Over 75 minutes (accompanied by a rather intrusive soundtrack of often intrusive sound effects), what start as hilariously outré tales from the bedroom are exposed as acts of desperation from a woman on the edge, who wears her sexuality as armour against revealing her true self. Being desired is the only time she feels in control, when she feels she has some worth 

She grieves for her friend Boo and blames herself for her death. Her legacy is the guinea-pig-themed cafe where they spent so many precious moments. And Fleabag’s about to lose that, too. Given the play starts in a job interview, the portents are not good.

In a tightly controlled performance directed by Vicky Jones, Waller-Bridge sometimes directly conspires with the audience with that trademark side-eye, but rarely needs to, as the whole story in now directly addressed to us.

Her script is uproarious in its graphic honesty. ‘I stood staring at a handprint on my wall from when I had a threesome on my period,’ tells you everything about her brutal frankness, her sexual freedom and her moments of introspection in one concise line. The telling scene of her masturbating to a Barack Obama speech as her boyfriend lies sleeping next to her is already the stuff of TV comedy lore – the Del Boy falling through the bar of the empowered millennial woman.

Although you’re never more than a minute away from another hilariously inappropriate image, it’s the emotional turmoil Waller-Bridge depicts so vividly that has made this a hit since its very first days at the Soho Theatre and the Edinburgh Fringe. You won’t find tickets to the West End run – unless you’re lucky in the daily lottery – but there will be a chance to see this on cinema screens on September 12. Seize it.

• Click here for details of which cinemas will be screening the play's live broadcast.

Review date: 29 Aug 2019
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Wyndham's Theatre