Section:GDN 12 PaGe:11 Edition Date:190829 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 28/8/2019 16:47 cYanmaGentaYellowbl
The Guardian
Thursday 29 August 2019 11
Waller-Bridge says things like, “You
don’t see these characters. Women
don’t get to be hedonistic and vulgar
and dirty and horny.” And now
there’s a lot more of that.
LS: Something I’ve found weird is
the confl ation of Waller-Bridge, who
is aspirational because she’s a young
woman who made a trailblazing TV
show, and the character of Fleabag,
into this broad “relatable” fi gure. Do
you think the character is relatable?
HJD: It comes back to the piece we
published in the Guide about class
in Fleabag. The cultural product that
Waller-Bridge has made is inherently
part of her experiences and it’s only
as relatable as the experiences she’s
had. S he would have made it anyway,
whoever she was – but it would have
been very diff erent.
LS: The play was interesting because
the staging is so simple – she’s a thin,
quite posh white woman, but you
don’t see her dad’s house, which is
one of the big class tells in the TV
show. So it doesn’t have the same
baggage. I think it tries to reject
the basics of rel atability to resist
people relat ing to the character in
a superfi cial way. You can’t relate
to her because you both like the
same bands or books, and she
dresses plainly. It’s kind of a clean
emotional slate – although obviously
as a white woman she’s seen as a
cultural “default”, so she eschews
the baggage that a woman of colour
would automatically have to carry.
KW: There’s that line in Lady Bird :
“Don’t you think they’re the same
thing: love and attention?” Fleabag
feeds off that. I also love how she
covers her insecurities with cynicism
and humour.
LS: In the play, she’s surprisingly
cruel compared with the TV show.
There are several fat jokes. I was
sitting next to a large guy, who was
laughing, but I wondered how he felt.
KW: There’s also a line about getting
with a girl when Fleabag has a
boyfriend, and how it “doesn’t
count”. People would leap on that
now. I think they made her less
cruel for TV.
HJD: I think producers know
that people want characters to
be “complicated”, but ultimately
relatable. They’re part of a pile of
things you’re meant to like – your
Sally Rooney or whatever. How
much you actually relate to those
specifi c characters, I think, is by the
by. It’s more how you relate to the
group you’re meant to be in.
LS: With Fleabag, the phenomen on
is almost separate from the thing.
Nobody is even considering those
cruel lines about weight and
sexuality. Did seeing the play change
your interpretation of it? I got a
much stronger sense that it was
about the eff ects of pornography on
a generation of young women. That
feels like something we were talking
about six years ago.
KW: That’s what Lyn Gardner says
in her original review. Those issues
are still massive for teenagers,
although the impact of
pornography feels like a less
vital conversation now.
HJD: And we’re post-#MeToo.
If she were to write it now, you
might consider the interview
scene [in which she accidentally lifts
her top up to someone accused of
groping] diff erently.
LS: And her lack of boundaries – the
issue of a woman taking advantage.
HJD: I wonder how much of a
creative or commercial decision it
was to do the play again?
LS: I like interviewing musicians
at the end of a tour, two years after
they’ve released an album and they
know the limitations of the work and
it no longer feels like them. I want to
hear her do a proper post mortem. Do
you think Fleabag is feminist?
KW: I think she is because she has
been told that she can do what she
wants and she follows that rule.
And that does come from a place of
privilege. And her attitude to sex is
so honest. Actually, I’m not sure.
LS: I don’t know. Her porn habits –
gangbang, teens – probably aren’t
ethical, and she’s relentlessly cruel.
I think her moral and psychological
compass exploded after her mum
and best friend died. She’s not even
at a point where she’s grasping
for values. She’s fulfi lling a more
immediate need for physical and
psychological succour. It’s not until
series two that she contemplates
what it means to be good.
KW: The play is feminist. Six years
ago, it was challenging. Her dad
sending her to lectures about
feminism, and the speaker asking
if they would trade fi ve years of
their life for the perfect body – that
tries to defy the ideas of what makes
a good feminist. That was defi nitely
exciting then.
HJD: These conversations have
moved on, but we still sometimes
regress slightly – look at Jameela Jamil.
LS: Also what complicates that
moment is that Waller-Bridge has
the perfect body! What happens to
this play now?
KW: I’m sure every drama student
will do it as a monologue. Which
is great, because it adds to the
interesting ones for women.
HJD: I wish it would inspire people
to do their own thing rather than just
doing what is on trend. It becomes
a mould instead of a prompt to
think, “Who am I and what are my
experiences?”
KW: The media is to blame – any play
or show featuring a vaguely cynical
woman who talks about sex becomes
“the new Fleabag”. We need more
inventive ways of writing about
those people because I’m very happy
to see 15 more plays that are about
horny, angry women.
Fleabag is at Wyndham’s Theatre,
London , until 12 September. It will be
broadcast in cinemas on 12 September‘Fans rushed
to get selfi es
and autographs
after the show’Several years ago, when I was back home in
Lithuania, I went to the beach for the fi rst time
in years. I grabbed my longboard, gathered a
group of friends and family , and headed for one
of the most popular spots on the Baltic coast.
On this beach, there is a bridge that overlooks
the shore. As I walked across it, I could see all
the bathers lying beneath me on the sand. I had
a perfect bird’s eye view. I had never seen the
beach from that angle , and it was fascinating.
That evening, I began the research for this
series, Comfort Zone. I looked through reams
of beach photography, but pretty much none of
the images had captured the scene from above.
I found nothing documenting it from this angle
in this clean, simple, almost clinical way.
I wanted to create a typology of beach culture- a kind of study of the phenomenon as if I were
investigating a diff erent species. I was thinking
about what it would be like to come to Earth as
an alien and witness this: what sense would you
make of it?
I used equipment to help me to shoot
from above while I was moving around at
beach level : a four-metre-long pole with an
attachment for my camera, and a radio trigger
for when I was ready to shoot.
It was important that the shots were
perfectly candid, so I didn’t tell anyone that
I was shooting them. But people were looking
at me. I realised that the people who weren’t
looking at me must be sleeping, so I knew
which ones I wanted to photograph.
I tried to avoid any conversations or arouse
suspicion. I wasn’t doing anything against
the law, but the beach is a place where people
sometimes don’t feel comfortable being shot.
Some people did approach me though – you
Tadao Cern
My best shot
‘It was important the photos were candid, so I didn’t
tell anyone I was shooting them. They are bodies you
don’t often see in magazines or on social media.’
can imagine seeing the same person every
day walking with this strange thing on his
shoulders, so they asked me what I was doing.
I said I was just taking photos of nature, and
if they were persistent with their questions,
I would show them images I had taken of the
sea or the forest.
When those images started to be published,
there were some concerns, and people
questioned my practice. My view is that I’ve
never focused on someone’s personal life: my
work is about society, community, humanity
– it’s not about one particular person.
I took this shot on the fi rst day I started to
work on the series. It was nerve- racking: I had
no idea how the pictures were going to look and
I didn’t know how people would respond to
me. That evening at home, I looked through the
day’s work. Nothing was right apart from this
shot. This image convinced me that the whole
project was worth pursuing. For that reason
alone, it’s special to me.
T he image tells a story: you can see the very
shade of the woman’s lipstick and the veins
in her legs, but it’s also oddly surreal. There’s
a kind of dissonance in it that appeal s to me.
A s in the rest of the serie s, the bodies you see
are real. They are ones you don’t often see in
magazines or on social media. We’re bombarded
with images of people eating perfectly healthy
food and being perfectly in shape, and so many
feel excluded by that. The reality we are often
presented with is utterly distorted.
I don’t consider the beach as a utopian
escape from the city, but it does illustrate how
our behaviour is conditioned by social norms
beyond our control.
Why is it acceptable
to be half naked on
a beach, but not in
a library? Why does
our environment
dictate what we can
and cannot wear? I t’s
because our behaviour
is always being shaped
by people around us.
In the age of social
media, we are obsessed
with the concept of
individuality. These
images show that, on
some level, we just do
what everyone else
does. The individual is
much less important
than the collective or
the whole.
I have travelled to
other beaches across
the world, thinking it
would be interesting to
document how beach
culture diff ers. What I
found is that it doesn’t.
We buy the same
things, we often read the same things translated
into whatever language we speak and we use
the same brands a lot of the time. You can
see globalisation in action on the beach, and
how consumerism shapes all of our lives. But
you can also see a kind of commonality, the
similarities between us , no matter where in
the world we are.
Interview by Edward SiddonsThe CV
Born Šiauliai,
Lithuania, 1983.
Training Vilnius
Gediminas Technical
University.
High point
“Finishing this series,
because it let me start
something new.”
Low point “ Every
day you question if
you’re good enough.”
Top tip “The volume
of work you put
out is the most
important thing.”RELEASED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws