The Guilty Feminist by Deborah Frances-White

Author:Deborah Frances-White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2019-12-30T16:00:00+00:00

I also interviewed the woman who introduced me to the wonderful Susan Wokoma—the astoundingly talented Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Phoebe has created and brought to life characters who embody the power of yes in her hit theatre and television show Fleabag and television show Killing Eve. The characters in these shows don’t conform to patriarchal norms for women, while remaining gloriously, wholly female. Phoebe is widely thought to have moved the bar for the sort of transgressive women who can appear on screen and find a large, excited audience. In doing this, she’s provided much-needed representation for women who want to live at full mast, flying their own colors. To do this she needed her creative partner Vicky Jones, who directed and developed the live show Fleabag and script edited the television version. Phoebe and Vicky had to create a microclimate for success and put a lot of different ingredients into the petri dish that is their company, DryWrite. To know Phoebe is to know the power of yes in human form. She offers her insights here.

Phoebe, when I met you, you seemed to be bursting with a desire to live at full mast and tell stories to the world, but the power structures (in this case the entertainment industry) were rarely responding to women as writers with voices or directors with vision at that time, what made you think you could do it and approach it with the confidence you did?

I just loved doing it so much that I couldn’t stop trying. It’s a compulsion more than a confidence. I was so excited at the prospect of making an audience laugh and cry that I wanted to be a part of making that happen. I also had a great creative partner in Vicky Jones. She made me think I could do anything. I did feel I had something to offer. Mainly the comedy. I knew I could land a joke and I knew I had an instinct for telling stories. Outside of that I was totally in the dark until we set up DryWrite. Producing those nights became the training ground for bringing those instincts together and giving them purpose.

As an actress I hardly came across any roles for my age that felt real or relatable to me. I just wanted to play someone who wasn’t either a victim or a ball-breaker. When you asked me to write for the storytelling festival, I’d written a bunch of short plays for DryWrite, but I’d never written anything just for me solo. Most people I knew would roll their eyes at the idea of a “one-woman-play”… which made me want to do it even more… It was my chance to put my “interesting, funny, complicated, female character” where my mouth was. There was something so raw and pure about simply sitting on that stool, looking directly into the eyes of the audience, with nothing to distract us other than the words, jokes, twists and turns of a story.

It might be worth saying that

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