Fleabag, and the Audience That Was Her Hiding Place

It is the middle of the night in a London flat, and a woman is standing behind her front door, waiting for a man who has texted to ask whether he can come and find her. Before he arrives she turns and looks straight at us. She tells us, the way you would tell a friend on the sofa, everything she has just done so that she will look as though she has done nothing at all. Then he is there, and they are in bed, and she is still talking to us.

That is the first minute of Fleabag, and the series in miniature. A woman is in a room with somebody, and she is also somewhere else: with us. All through its two short series she turns to the camera in the middle of scenes, with a remark or only a look, and nobody in the room notices. She tells us what she really thinks of everyone she is with. We laugh, we take her side, and we become, as the series means us to, her accomplices.

Then, in the second series, a man she is talking with stops mid-conversation. She has just turned to us, as she always does, and he asks her where she just went. He is a Catholic priest, and he is the first person in the whole story who has seen her do it.

This essay is about what that question does to her.

It discusses both series, to the last shot. A death lies under the whole story, and at the end of the first series she comes close to taking her own life. Both are stated plainly here, and neither is described.

The argument runs like this. The audience was never only her confidant. It was her hiding place. We are the one listener in her life who can never ask her anything back: we receive whatever she chooses to tell us and nothing she does not, we laugh in the right places, we cannot be hurt, and we cannot tell her family. That makes us perfect company for a woman carrying something she cannot say, and the first series proves it by keeping one thing even from us. Then somebody notices where she goes when she comes to us. Being seen costs her the hiding place and gives her back the room she is actually in. It does not give her the man. At a bus stop, after he has chosen God, she looks at us once more, shakes her head, and walks on without us.

Fleabag was written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who also plays the woman at its centre, from a one-woman show she first performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2013, where it won a Fringe First award. The first series, six episodes, was broadcast on BBC Three in the summer of 2016; the second, another six, on BBC One in the spring of 2019. The episodes run about twenty-five minutes, and Harry Bradbeer directed all of them but the first. Sian Clifford plays her older sister, Claire; Andrew Scott, the priest; Olivia Colman, the sisters’ godmother, who has taken up with their widowed father; Bill Paterson, the father; Brett Gelman, Claire’s husband, Martin. The second series won six Emmys in 2019, among them best comedy series, lead actress and writing.

She is never given a name. The people around her are credited by what they are to her — Dad, the Godmother, the Priest — and she is credited by a word. Waller-Bridge has said that Fleabag, and Flea, were her own nicknames when she was younger, and that she wanted the character to look in control of her life when she is not. In English slang the word means a shabby lodging house, or a scruffy animal.

One note on method. Dialogue is given here in paraphrase. The essay reads the device, what talking to the camera does and what the series makes it cost, and not the woman using it. She is a character written with great exactness, and the clinical words people sometimes reach for about her are not used here, because the series does something more precise than any of them.

The asides feel like the most honest thing on television. She tells us about her appetites, her contempt, her boredom, the unworthy thought that arrives at the worst possible moment. She lets us watch her be unkind. It is easy to take all this for a total confession, and the series wants us to.

Here is what we learn about Boo. Boo was her best friend, and together they opened the café that Fleabag now runs alone and cannot make pay. It was an ordinary café until Fleabag, stuck for a birthday present, gave Boo a guinea pig called Hilary, and Boo took Hilary so seriously that the whole place turned into a guinea-pig café. Boo is dead. In the first episode, in a taxi on the way home, Fleabag tells the driver what happened, and we listen: Boo’s boyfriend had cheated on her, and Boo, to punish him, made what was meant to be a pretend attempt on her own life, and it went wrong.

What she does not tell us is that the woman he had slept with was her.

We learn that at the end of the first series, in the same stretch in which everything else gives way. Claire has chosen to believe Martin over her. The sisters’ confrontation sets off a memory, and the series shows us what she had kept even from us. Six episodes of intimacy are rearranged in a minute. Every aside we enjoyed was true. All of them had been arranged around one thing she was not saying.

This is the property of an audience the series is quietly about. An audience cannot ask a follow-up question. It can only receive what is offered, so it hears the confession that is made and has no way of noticing the one that is not. A friend on the sofa would sooner or later have asked why she never mentions the boyfriend, or why the café matters so much, or what exactly happened that night. We could not. Read through the device, that is the point: someone carrying a secret could hardly choose a better listener than one who never interrupts.

An essay in this Library, “Bluets, and the Container for What Cannot Be Said Directly”, argued that a grief sometimes becomes sayable only sideways, through something a person can keep hold of while the unbearable thing is approached at an angle, and that this is not the same as avoiding it. The asides are a container too, but they are built the other way round. They hold everything else, so that the one thing never has to be approached at all. Read this way, sex, jokes and the camera itself all do the same work in the first series. They keep her from feeling one thing, and the thing is guilt.

The series opens on sex, and presents it as an anecdote in progress. That is not an accident of tone. Through the first series she sleeps with men she does not much like, one of whom the series names only by an insult, and she narrates it to us, dryly, often while it is still going on. The series lets sex be several things at once: appetite, which it never apologises for; distraction; and sometimes something close to a punishment she is handing out to herself.

It would be easy to call this a symptom and move on. This essay will not, because the series is more exact than a symptom. What the camera does to sex is turn it into material. A woman telling a story about what is happening to her is, at that moment, the narrator of her experience rather than the person inside it. She can be in the bed and out of it at once, present enough to take part and far enough away to comment. For someone who cannot afford to feel much, that is not a quirk of style. It is a very good place to stand.

It is also why her frankness about desire, which was rightly praised, is not the same thing as intimacy. The frankness is real. She wants, she enjoys, she is funny about wanting, and the story never punishes her for any of it. But everything she tells us about sex is told to someone who cannot touch her, cannot want anything from her, and cannot be disappointed in her afterwards.

In the first series the clearest attempt to take what she has not offered comes from her sister’s husband. At Claire’s birthday party a drunk Martin tries to kiss her, and she refuses him. When she tells Claire, Martin persuades his wife that it happened the other way round, and Claire believes him, and turns down a promotion in Finland to stay. A refusal she made plainly is rewritten by the man she refused, and the person she most needed to see it clearly does not. Keep that beside everything else in this essay. The opposite of being seen is not being ignored. It is being misread, by someone close, in the version that suits somebody else.

The café is failing when the series begins. The bank has refused her a loan, and the customers are few. She keeps it open anyway, with the guinea pig and the décor that grew up around it, and the series never has to say why. It is the last thing she and Boo made together, and it is the place where she has to stand, every day, with what she knows.

The series states the guilt as plainly as it states anything. Boo is dead, and Fleabag had slept with the man whose betrayal Boo was trying to punish. The story never makes that lighter than it is, and it never decides that she deserves to be destroyed by it. Both are choices, and both matter.

The end of the first series is its lowest point, and it should be said plainly. Claire has believed Martin. Their father, when Fleabag goes to him, turns her away. She comes close to taking her own life. The bank manager who refused her the loan happens to pass the café, stops, and asks whether she is all right, and she tells him the truth about the guilt she has been carrying. He listens. He tells her that people make mistakes, which is why pencils have rubbers on the end, and he offers to look at her loan again.

Anyone who recognises that evening from the inside should talk to a trained person or a crisis line tonight, not later. Reaching for one is not an overreaction.

Notice who hears the first real confession in the series. Not us. A man in a suit with troubles of his own and no stake in hers, someone she was never performing for, who asks one ordinary question and waits for the answer. Six episodes of talking to the camera had not done what one person stopping does. The series does not make a spectacle of her despair, and neither will this essay. It lets an ordinary question do the work.

The second series opens a year later, with blood on her face. She is in a restaurant toilet cleaning up a nosebleed, and she turns to us and tells us that this is a love story. It is a claim, and the rest of the series tests it.

The café, it turns out, is doing well. The dinner is to celebrate her father’s engagement to the godmother. During it Claire has a miscarriage and refuses to tell anyone or to see a doctor. Fleabag tells the table that the miscarriage is hers, so that her sister can hide it, and then goes for Martin, whose flippancy about it she will not take. The sisters leave for the hospital in a cab together.

It is a lie told out of love, and it has the same shape as everything else she does with the truth. She moves it to where it can be managed.

Claire is the other half of this story, and this Library has written about her already. The essay “The Woman Who Holds Everything Is Not Fine. She Is Skilled.” took Claire as the woman who keeps everything running and says she is fine, and it saw that the two sisters wear two disguises: Claire’s competence, and Fleabag’s glances to the camera, which it called her way of not being present. That essay stopped, on purpose, before the end of the second series. This one takes the other disguise and follows it past that point, because what the second series asks is what happens to a disguise once somebody has watched it being put on.

This essay would put one thing slightly differently. The glances are not quite a way of being absent. They are a way of being present with somebody who cannot intrude.

She meets the priest as a fellow smoker, outside the engagement dinner; he is the one who is to marry her father and the godmother. He is funny, he likes a drink, he takes his vow of celibacy entirely seriously, and he talks to her about it with a frankness nobody else in her life brings to anything. He gives her a Bible with passages marked. For a while he is simply the most interesting person in any room she is in.

Then, in the third episode, she does what she always does. In the middle of a conversation she turns to us, and he stops, and asks her where she just went. Nobody has asked her that before. Nobody, in two series, has even noticed.

It is worth being exact about what he sees, because it is not what being seen usually means in stories about desire. He does not see her body; she has shown that to plenty of people. He does not see through her jokes to some hidden sweetness; she would have hated that, and so would the series. He sees her leave. He catches the half-second in which she steps out of the room to be with us, and he registers it as an absence. The whole device depended on nobody in the room being able to see that. Once one person can, the exit stops being an exit. It becomes something she does in front of someone, which he can ask about.

Why him? Speaking about the series at a BAFTA event in 2020, Waller-Bridge put it in her own terms. The priest mirrors her, she said, because he has God, while she is witnessed by the camera the whole way through, and the big question for her at the end is whether she can let go of it. That is the most useful key to the device this essay knows of. The one person who can see a woman talking to a witness nobody else can see is a man whose life is spent talking to one. He recognises the gesture because it is his own.

None of this asks the reader for a view about God, and the series asks for none. Prayer and the aside have the same shape, speech addressed to a witness no one else in the room can see, and the series gives his version of it exactly the seriousness it gives hers.

Being seen costs her first. She can no longer slip out of a conversation with him without being caught slipping out, and for a while she handles that the way she handles everything, with charm and deflection. When he tries to get to know her, and to help with what is troubling her, she turns him away, and a good day ends badly.

Then, one night, she goes to his church. They have both been drinking, and he hears her confession. She starts the way she starts everything, with a few ordinary sins offered for the laugh. And then, crying, she says something that is not a joke: that she wants someone to tell her how to live, what to wear and what to eat, what to believe, whom to love and how to tell them, because she thinks that so far she has been getting it wrong. They come close. He stops.

It may be the least defended thing she says in either series, and she says it to a person. It is also, notice, not the confession the first series was built around. Whatever she has or has not told him about Boo, what comes out of her in the confessional is a sentence about now: she does not know how to live, and she would like to be told. That is what being seen makes possible first. Not the secret. The need.

Soon after, he tells her family that he can no longer marry them, and tells her to stay away from his church. Then he comes to see her, tells her that what he feels is more than physical, and they sleep together. And the series does something it has not done before. As they reach for each other, she turns towards the camera and pushes us away.

The first scene of the series was sex told to us. The one that matters most is the one she will not let us watch. Read through the device, that is the whole argument in a single gesture: the sex that was a way of not feeling was performed for an audience, and the sex that is not is kept from one. They are two adults, and the vow he is breaking is his to break and his to keep. The series never pretends it is not real, and neither does this essay.

This Library’s essay on YOU, “Why YOU Is So Unsettling: Being Seen and Being Watched Can Look Similar at First”, argued that being seen is a round trip: you offer something, it is received, it lands wrong, you correct it, you try again. It also argued that intimacy needs places the other person cannot see. The asides had always been a round trip with the return leg taken out. She offered, we received, and nothing came back. With him the trip runs both ways, and for the first time in the series she needs a place that we cannot see.

The wedding day gathers every thread. She gives the godmother back the sculpture she stole in the first episode, a small torso of a woman, and the godmother tells her that it was modelled on her mother. Before the day is out it is in Fleabag’s bag again. For two series her mother has been passed from hand to hand, stolen, given as a present, returned and stolen again, and she did not know it. The series leaves that unexplained, which is right.

Claire tells Martin the truth about the miscarriage and asks him to leave her. When Fleabag urges her to go after Klare, the Finnish colleague she has fallen for, before his flight leaves, Claire tells her that the only person she would run through an airport for is her sister, and then she goes. Their father, with cold feet before his own wedding, tells Fleabag that she knows how to love better than any of them, and that this is why she finds it all so painful. The priest marries the couple after all, and preaches about love: that it is awful, that it hurts, and that it takes a great deal of hope.

Afterwards, at a bus stop, they say at last that they love each other. When she says it, he tells her it will pass. She asks whether it is God, and he tells her that it is: he has chosen God. They part kindly. A fox appears, the animal he has told her has been following him for years, and she points it the way he went.

Then comes the last minute, the one the whole series has been walking towards. She takes the sculpture out of her bag and holds it. She turns to us, close, with a small wet grin. When she gets up to go, she shakes her head at us — do not follow — and waves, and walks away down the street, and we stay where we are.

It is tempting to read that as a woman cured, and the next section but one explains why that is too neat. But it is worth being exact about what has changed. He did not stay. Being seen did not keep him and was never going to; he had told her from the start, in effect, what he was married to. What being seen did was make the witness unnecessary. On this reading, she needed an audience that could not see her because being seen was more than she could bear. Once it had happened, and she had come through it, and through losing him, she may simply have stopped needing a listener who could not ask. She leaves us at the bus stop the way a person leaves a room she has been hiding in, when she no longer needs to hide.

In Japan the series streams on Prime Video, under a title that keeps the English word and sets its katakana spelling beside it. The device at its centre can look like a theatre trick, the kind of thing only a London comedian would do. It is closer to ordinary life than that.

Plenty of people now keep a running commentary on their own lives, addressed to an audience that is not in the room: the friends in a group chat who get the date narrated while it is still going on, the account under another name where someone posts what she could not say to anyone who knows her. These are asides. They are warm, and funny, and often a real lifeline. And they share the property the series is about. The listener can laugh, and sympathise, and send something kind at two in the morning, and cannot ask where she went.

For a woman living in Japan in her second language there can be another layer. The people who get her running commentary are often at home, in her first language, in a time zone where it is already morning; they share her jokes and not her room. That channel can be what keeps a person whole in a new country. It can also quietly become the place where she lives, while the people who could notice her leaving a conversation are the ones sitting with her, in the language she is still learning.

None of this is a claim about how people in Japan live, or about women here in general. It is only the shape of the device, turning up in ordinary places. The series did not invent the aside. It held one up long enough for somebody inside the story to see it.

Much of the audience took the second series as a romance; the internet gave the priest a nickname, the hot priest, and it stuck. The series invites that reading, and says so in its first minute. This essay has declined it for a reason the series supplies itself. The man who sees her cannot stay, the story never pretends he might, and the last image is not of the two of them. It is of her, leaving us.

The strongest form of the objection is not that the romance is shallow. It is that the series completes a woman’s turn through a man’s attention, and that an essay admiring her walk away from the camera has to account for the fact that she takes it only after a man has looked at her properly. That is fair, and this Library has conceded the same point before, about another woman who stops being looked at, in “Cléo from 5 to 7, and the Hour She Stops Being Looked At”. The narrowest answer available is that the seeing in the last episode is spread around: a sister who says she would run through an airport only for her, a father who tells her she loves better than any of them, and, a year earlier, a bank manager who asked whether she was all right. The priest was the first to see her, not the only one. That is a narrowing, not a refutation.

A second objection comes from the other side. Catholic writers have read the ending not as a love lost but as a vow kept. Writing for the University of Chicago Divinity School, Richard Rosengarten observed that the one promise she keeps throughout is to the camera and the viewer, and that a woman who failed a promise to her best friend is at last able to respect someone else’s. In the Jesuit magazine America, marking ten years since the series reached American viewers, Michael O’Connell found the final shots hopeful. This essay has no standing to rule on those readings and does not compete with them. It notes only that they agree with it on the essential thing. The priest’s choice is not a failure of the story, and it is not his failure. It is his vow, and the series lets him keep it.

A third objection is formal. The asides may simply be an inheritance from the stage show, where one woman talks to a room for an hour because that is what a one-woman show is, and the series may have kept them because they are funny and they work. On that account this essay has turned a comic engine into an inner life. Waller-Bridge has said that she never had one particular listener in mind, and that she likes people to decide for themselves who is being spoken to. This is one reading, offered as one.

A fourth: the ending is too neat for a story about grief. A woman walks away from the camera and the reader writes the word healed across the screen. The series does not. It gives her no speech about recovery, and grief is not a problem with a final episode. The most this essay will claim is that she no longer needs us, and that she goes holding the likeness of her mother. What she does next is not ours to know.

Last, the objection aimed at this Library. This house sells private companionship. A reading in which being seen by someone who cannot stay is still real, and can still change a person, is exactly the reading such a house would like, and a reader is entitled to discount it. It is fair to add what the series itself says, because it does not help the house. Its one paid listener, a counsellor whose session is her father’s birthday present to her, gets a single uncomfortable truth out of her. The people who change her are a stranger who stopped, a sister, a father at the last minute, and a priest who did not stay.

An audience is not a witness who can ask. It can keep a person company for a long time. It can laugh in the right places, take her side and hear a great deal that is true. What it cannot do is notice what she leaves out, or see her leave the room, or ask where she went. For some stretches of a life that may be exactly what is needed, and the series never mocks her for it.

There are good reasons to talk to someone who cannot ask. A listener like that cannot be disappointed in her. It cannot leave, or tell her family, or look at her differently in the morning. For a person carrying something she cannot put down, that is not a failure of courage. It is how she gets through the months when the thing is heavier than she is.

Being seen is something else, and the series is honest that it is not always kind. It begins with a question nobody invited, from someone who noticed her leave. It costs the hiding place. And it comes with no promise that the one who sees will stay.

This part is for you. If there is a place where you tell everything except the one thing — a friend who gets the funny version, a chat that gets the running commentary, an account under another name — you are not a fraud for having it. It may have been the only room that was safe. And if someone has ever stopped in the middle of a conversation and asked where you just went, and it frightened you, the fear was not a sign that something was wrong with you. It was what being seen feels like, before it feels like anything else. You do not have to answer the first time. You are allowed to stay in the room.

Who hears the funniest version of your life, and is it the same person who would notice if something were missing from it?

Is there something you have told nobody, and have you arranged the people you talk to so that nobody is ever in a position to ask?

The last time someone asked where you had gone in the middle of a conversation, what did you do?

Which witness in your life would be hardest to walk away from, and what would you need to have first?