"'Fleabag' throbs with a concentrated, combustible vitality...Oh, the places she takes us, the hilarious heights and the despondent depths (or do I mean the opposite?)...Ms. Waller-Bridge deploys an ace stand-up’s sense of timing...'Fleabag' segues with canny purposefulness among earnest wistfulness and dismissive flippancy, scorching pain and echoing, hollow silence, giving equal weight to each...It’s so gloriously disruptive."
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"Waller-Bridge is a brilliant comic in total technical control, and she shapes her monologue perfectly around her own skills. She subverts and then re-subverts expectations at whiplash speed, detonating small bombs of emotion just when we expect a joke. As an expression of craft, it’s dazzling....What a lot of fun falling apart seems to be!...I, for one, recommend it with all my slovenly heart."
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"In this sharply-told nugget of a play, this unfiltered, sexually obsessed and profane character brilliantly reveals the thin divide between the comedy of lashing out and self-deprecation — and the pain, sadness and introspection that hide within...Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag has an allure and likability even when she says such terrible things about her family, her lovers and, of course, herself...While laughs are plentiful, loneliness, disappointment and death are there, too."
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"Deliciously inappropriate humor peppered throughout, becomes secondary to the underlying tragedy that keeps bobbing up to the surface to catch you off guard...It has the pinpoint observational comedy of great standup, the fearless honesty and shamelessness of a raw confessional and the subtlety to draw you in...It's both gut-bustingly funny and gut-wrenchingly sad...This is punchy, ferociously funny and expertly nuanced storytelling by a writer-performer in full command of her singular voice."
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"Waller-Bridges’ portrayal of her grief, and the slow onion peel of her role in her friend’s silly, terrible death, is still affecting here, even if it feels like the first season’s six episodes had much more time to let that narrative arc breathe. All of these nitpicks are moot, of course, if you haven’t seen the TV show...It’s still a brisk, clever, and indisputably engaging evening of theater, performed at a level of intimacy that most Phoebe Waller-Bridge fans can only dream of in 2019."
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"The hype is completely justified...Waller-Bridge's priceless facial expressions do half the work as she flinches in disgust, or bunches her lips up to portray a date...Vicky Jones's less-is-more direction further focuses an already powerful performance...We're riveted...Like an intense cross between Lena Dunham and David Sedaris, Waller-Bridge mines the unglamorous truth of urban living and turns it into comedy gold."
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“She had me laughing helplessly...Waller-Bridge is such a confident entertainer...Waller-Bridge steers us confidently from the comic horrors of the London singleton life into some very, very dark waters. She does so with unerring technical skill and a kind of cockeyed compassion for Fleabag; if she is a monster, she is an all-too-recognizably human one...A slick comic routine wedded to a cry of despair, ‘Fleabag’ is both perfectly awful and awfully perfect.”
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"Simultaneously entertaining and disturbing...Genuinely funny when it wants to be—and obviously intended to be. All the same, it’s about someone who, at her distressed core and at the end of the day, is living a life not so darn funny...Even then, when it is funny, it’s most often funny despite itself, funny in the way of people attempting humor to lighten embarrassment and shame."
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