Fleabag is painfully funny. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s comedy, which took critics and viewers by storm in 2018 is in equal parts excruciating and exhilarating. Writing this sharp does not come along every day.
And as series two begins, the good news is that it might just be even more painful, even more powerful, and even funnier than the debut.
Fiona Shaw, so outstanding in Killing Eve as super-dry, stylish, secretive, sensational Carolyn Martens, head of the Russia Desk at MI6, joins the cast of Fleabag for series two as a psychologist, alongside Sherlock’s Andrew Scott as a priest. That’s an explosive combination…
“Phoebe has the sort of gift Oscar Wilde had of turning ordinary things into the extraordinary,” says Shaw. “She inverts things very surprisingly and very naturally. She really is queen of the comedy of embarrassment, which is very English. It comes from her exploring terror. I think all comedy comes from terror.
“I keep saying she is a bit like William Congreve. He wrote ‘The Way of The World’ in 1700 when he was 21. She has that sort of facility, she sees her world very clearly. And she polishes it so no word is wasted. While we were filming, she would rewrite it – improving things, turning the knife further in.”
