Last year, brilliant 28-year-old actress and writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge performed naked in a fully plumbed bathroom for Jack Thorne’s intimate play ‘Mydidae’. Now she’s bringing her filthy one-woman solo writing debut ‘Fleabag’ to London following its successful run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Fleabag’s eponymous heroine is sex-obsessed: is she based on you?
‘She is and isn’t. I haven’t done any of the things she talks about. I wanted to write about our saturated sexual generation and the impact being oversexualised has on people. She’s an amalgamation of a lot of my fears with jokes on top.’
You have an impressive knowledge of porn genres – did you research?
‘We did. My director Vicky Jones and I said, “I think we need to get into her zone.” So we investigated. It’s not a moralising play at all: we can and should watch porn, but there’s one particular scene where we wanted to highlight the danger of when there’s too much of it.’
Have people been shocked?
‘We ran it early on at Latitude Festival and there’s a moment where Fleabag talks about having a threesome on her period, and four people walked out. But mostly audiences have responded well. My mum was fine with it: she came to an early run and gave us notes.’
Was it difficult performing naked in ‘Mydidae’?
‘It was terrifying, but I got over it because Jack [Thorne] wrote the play so cleverly. A friend of mine from abroad Googled me recently and found loads of pictures of me in the bath. She thought I’d been letting too many people into my house.’
Do you plan to focus on writing?
‘I seem to be crowbarring a tall lanky girl (me) into everything I write. But I’m working on a few things for TV and film and there might be a version of “Fleabag” appearing on screen.’
