I was sitting next to a large guy, who was laughing, but I wondered how he felt. LS: In the play, she’s surprisingly cruel compared to the show.
#Does qcast still work tv
With Sian Clifford and Olivia Colman in Fleabag the TV show. I can really understand that and also love how she covers her insecurities with cynicism and humour. KW: There’s that line in Lady Bird where someone says, “love and attention, it’s basically the same thing”. It’s kind of a clean emotional slate – although obviously as a white woman she’s seen as a cultural “default”, so she eschews the baggage that a woman of colour would automatically have to carry. She doesn’t have any cultural signifiers, so you can’t relate to her because you both like the same bands or books, and she dresses plainly. It actively tries to resist people relating to the character in a superficial way. I think the construct of Fleabag tries to reject the basics of relatability. LS: The play was interesting because the staging is so simple – obviously she’s a thin, quite posh white woman, but you don’t see her dad’s house, which is one of the big class tells in the TV show. She would have made it anyway, whoever she was – but it would have been very different. The cultural product that Waller-Bridge has made is inherently part of her experiences and it’s only as relatable as the experiences she’s had. HJD: It comes back to the piece we published about class in Fleabag. LS: Something I’ve found weird is the conflation of Waller-Bridge, who is aspirational because she’s a young woman who made a trailblazing TV show, and the character of Fleabag, into this broad “relatable” figure. Women don’t get to be hedonistic and vulgar and dirty and horny.” And now there’s a lot more of that.
In interviews from 2013, when they first staged it, Waller-Bridge says things like, “You don’t see these characters. HJD: Does it feel dated because people have tried to replicate it? But then, has there ever been a one-woman show in the West End that has been so financially viable? That in itself is incredible. And when you think how many plays are struggling for a stage, it feels slightly unfair when the same thing gets done again. I’ve just been at the Edinburgh fringe, where I saw 50 more exciting shows. The monologue is solid but nothing hugely special. KW: As a play, you could tell it was six years old. Waller-Bridge greets fans after the show at Wyndham’s theatre, London. LS: It’s symptomatic of our cultural inability to let anything end: the franchise of the franchise of the franchise. I needed it to feel different for it not to feel like a cash cow. HJD: There was one aside where she’s talking about the sister’s husband, and she says, “He’s not even sexy enough to beat his wife.” And then she says, “Joking!” I couldn’t tell if that was an aside from Fleabag or Waller-Bridge? On TV it’s much more wink-wink. In the theatre, it was all aside, in a way. Her face had to do a lot more work than on TV, which was all about the aside. LS: You saw a lot more of Waller-Bridge as a physical comedian – especially impersonating all the repressed men in her life. KW: It’s a tough task to keep an audience engaged for an hour when you’re not moving. What did you think of the play on a technical level? LS: At first, she was looking into the middle distance, and I thought, that’s not going to work. It removes the intimacy – I did not feel any intimacy in that room. You’re in this tiny 60-seater and you feel as if she’s whispering just to you.
KW: No! I wish people could interact with it more because that was the original idea. HJD: I understand singing along to a band, but theatre is meant to be a quiet experience. KW: Yeah – people pre-empting the laughs, knowing exactly what’s going to happen. It felt like the cultural capital of being able to say, “I was there”. The woman next to me paid £177 to be there and ran out when it finished to get a photo and an autograph. KW: The laughs were disproportionate to how funny the jokes actually were.
The woman next to me laughed at every single line. KW: Did she get a massive cheer as soon as she walked on? People had an expectation that they wanted to see replicated and she did it. There was a sense that people weren’t getting gratification from connecting with the show, but from seeing someone famous in an intimate setting. Hannah J Davies: It was like MTV Unplugged – something you already know in a more intimate form. When it’s freighted with the phenomenon, it doesn’t work. If you see it now, you’re always aware: that’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge. But the play was originally such a bolt from the blue. Laura Snapes: I liked seeing the original source material. The show is just so much more developed, so the play can’t help but feel a little disappointing. Kate Wyver: After the TV show, the play felt like going to a gallery and looking at the artist’s sketchbooks.
0 kommentar(er)
