The female power
The British actress, writer, playwright, and director Phoebe Waller-Bridge started doing small plays and theater. Her writings include Fleabag which is the tale of a young woman who is attempting to navigate modern London life.
BBC Three gave Waller-Bridge a chance to convert this play into a six-part comedy show for TV. It received wide critical acclaim and it was re-telecast by BBC Two.
Amazon Video service took it to the USA where it premiered in September 2016. The 31-year-old actress cum writer feels that a positive attitude is vital for success.
She says:
“You have to believe that you might be good at what you do, even though everyone else is telling you that you are not.”
Phoebe Waller-Bridge has bagged two more shows on BBC after the success of Fleabag. Phoebe also believes that collaboration is an integral part of any creative project and helps it to attain great heights. Talking about her best friend Vicky Jones, Phoebe said:
“The moment I found somebody that I trusted … and was inspired by, it really changed everything. It made me more fearless.”
Phoebe joins the ranks of new female writers who do not shy from projecting females in unflattering roles. She wants her female characters to be: (in her own words)
“real and complicated, contradictory, f-cked-up normal women like we all are, who are also allowed to be funny.”
She feels that an increasing number of female creative writers feel the same and have united together for a great movement of change.
She adds:
“What’s cool is that everyone’s really behind each other. There’s a real sense of, like, ‘Come on, we’ve got to do it together, we’ve got to change it.’”
The storyline of Fleabag
Fleabag is a touching sob story about a café owner nicknamed Fleabag (lead character played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge) and her life gone wrong. She is the actor as well as narrator for the series.
The story is about terrible, not likable people and broken homes. The café owner lady has difficulties making her ends meet. Her mother dies and her father moves in with an awful godmother. Her best friend gets killed in an accident and her boyfriend leaves her.
All the characters in this movie are defeated and broken and tend to not utilize to the fullest whatever life attempts to throw at them. The café owner lady charges her customers exorbitantly for the sandwiches at her café to keep her cash-strapped café afloat.
The customers are disgusted and helpless. But there is one customer who is shown as secretly and silently charging his electronic devices without buying any food at the café.
The series is interspersed with sexual encounters. At one point, in order to hasten the process of her business loan for her café, the lead character played by Phoebe also flashes her bra at the bank manager. She is also shown to have a fancy for Barack Obama and masturbates at his speeches.
In order to confess, Fleabag wakes up her mainly estranged father in the series and tells him:
“I have a horrible feeling that I am a greedy perverted selfish apathetic cynical depraved morally bankrupt woman who can’t even call herself a feminist.”
Without blinking an eyelid, her father answers:
“You get all that from your mother.”
The story also touches our lives and talks about loneliness, grief, and dysfunction. This small theater play has been given an extended life by BBC Three channel.
The origin of ‘Fleabag’
Phoebe Waller-Bridge is the second of three siblings and grew up in Ealing, London. Her elder sister, Isobel Waller-Bridge is a music director and has given music for the BBC Three adaptation of Fleabag.
Her younger brother Jasper Waller-Bridge is also in the music industry. Phoebe was nicknamed Flea by her parents Teresa and Michael Waller-Bridge. She says that the suffix ‘bag’ came to be attached later.
She does not have an idea as to how the name came to be applied to her but felt that its suggestion of a chaotic unpleasantness would befit the character in her play.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge says:
“I actually liked the bond it gave me. I can’t deny Fleabag’s a very personal piece but it’s not autobiographical.”
She started writing out of frustration on seeing the lack of interesting female roles in cinema and TV movies/series. She feels that things are changing for the better and movies with more powerful female characters are increasingly hitting the cinema houses.
Phoebe loves working with female co-stars and says:
“there’s nothing that makes me cry and laugh more than stories about friendship.”
She adds:
“It’s not always girls giggling behind their hands at boys; there’s a very unique sense of humour with female friends… there’s been an explosion of complex female characters.”
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