Phoebe Waller-Bridge goes back to Soho

Phoebe Waller-Bridge is taking BBC sleeper hit Fleabag back to the stage.

She is returning to the Soho Theatre where she first performed the damaged, sexually frank character – initially as a sketch – before taking it to the 2013 Edinburgh Fringe. It was then picked up by the BBC, where it has recently transferred from BBC Three to BBC Two.

Speaking to Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, Waller-Bridge said: ‘I’d say it’s about a young woman who uses humour and sexual candour and a false sense of confidence to distract and hide the fact she’s in quite a lot of pain. It’s about someone whose trying to distract people from the truth.’

She said the show trod the line between comedy and laughter, saying: ‘That’s the line I was most fascinated by as an audience an as a performer and a writer. I’ve always thought if you can get someone to laugh you can probably get them to cry. The play in itself was an experiment to see quite how closely along that like I could tread.

When asked if she was nervous about some elements of the graphic performance, she said: ‘I knew it was a complex character, it wasn’t just an attitude… it had something behind it – she was using sex and the power of talking about sex to give the impression of being in control. I think if there wasn’t another layer to her it would have seemed a bit more gratuitous.’

‘A lot of inspiration for the play came from talking really honestly with my friends and from the feelings I was having at the time – the frustrations, the confusions and the contradictions I was experiencing at the time in my mid-20s. And I thought, "What If I said these out lout to peop;e who I don’t know in a dark room.

‘The best thing is that they responded. So they could relate. Not knowing if they could relate was the sacriest gap, but they did.’

Earlier this year, Waller-Bridge paid tribute to the theatre for helping get her idea off the ground, saying they would have never made it to TV without the venue's support.

She said: : ‘It’s impossible to get anything in front of an audience in this city without selling a limb. Soho Theatre gave me my acting and my writing debut: the first collection of short plays I ever wrote was put on here and it felt like a really safe place for Fleabag to try out all her inappropriateness. Fleabag then went to Edinburgh before Soho brought it back and made it its home.’

Fleabag returns to the Soho Theatre from December 5 to 16 and tickets go on sale at noon today .

Published: 7 Oct 2016