National Theatre Live: Fleabag

Phoebe Waller-Bridge's attempt to do a funny monologue of her fleabag character may sound promising.

However, it doesn't take more than a few minutes to realize that this is a a complete waste of time. The audience thinks so too, and sadly you can hear (and not hear) their poor reaction in the background.

At the bottom line, this show anything BUT funny.

Specifically, there are two major problems in this production:

First, her performance, as stunning as it is, constantly switches between being ridiculously vulgar to being even more ridiculously emotional. This could have worked once, but when the direction uses the same infantile approach over and over every single time, it is simply exhausting. Even unwatchable at times.

Secondly, the jokes, on, the jokes... They are either killed by bad timing, or presented dead already. If this was to be a comedy, she should have constructed the script in a way which would offer some breathing and laughing. Instead, we get a very tense hysterical speech, with "hidden" punch lines in it.

I give it 4/10 due to Waller Bridge's presentation the character which was compelling. Otherwise, a comedy which is not funny, and has more vulgarity than smiles is not worth more than 1/10.