Robert Jackman

When Fleabag was a play everyone slagged it off – except The Spectator

Over the past six weeks something odd has happened. Head to the culture pages of any newspaper and you can’t miss it: the increasingly frantic praise for Fleabag, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s smash-hit sitcom, has reached crisis point. What started as a collective love-in is now full-blown hysteria.

After Monday’s finale, critics resembled devotees of a religious cult as they rushed to outdo each other with their tributes. One was literally speechless: Fleabag having ‘raised the bar so utterly’ that ‘all one could do was shake one’s head in appreciation’. The Guardian, rarely outdone in these things, published a guide to help its readers ‘survive after Fleabag’. The commentariat, it seems, is truly smitten.

But it wasn’t always this way. Back in 2013, Fleabag was a low-budget, one-woman play at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Phoebe Waller-Bridge, still a relative unknown, was the writer and lead.

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