Fleabag: Phoebe Waller-Bridge comedy to return to London stage

Fleabag, the hit BBC comedy that started life as a one-woman theatre show, is returning to the London stage.

Writer and star Phoebe Waller-Bridge will appear in the two-week run at the Soho Theatre in December.

Tickets for the 13 performances sold out within about 10 minutes of going on sale on Friday, the theatre said.

Fleabag was born when Waller-Bridge performed a series of short plays at the theatre before taking the character to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013.

'Testing material'

It then returned to Soho before being commissioned as a television series by BBC Three. It later moved to BBC Two and the series has received more than a million iPlayer requests this year.

Fleabag is a dark comedy in which Waller-Bridge plays a sarcastic, sex-obsessed young woman attempting to navigate modern life in London.

Waller-Bridge told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the show's stage origins helped her develop the TV series.

"I essentially had two months worth of build up to that performance you see on the screen, which is a luxury that few screen actors have," she said.

Waller-Bridge said performing the one-woman play helped her create the TV show

"In the show, people would laugh, so I'd go, 'Tick, that's staying in, I know how to perform that'. I was testing material and creating the right performance.

"The moment it was just me talking to a camera, I had to keep bringing back the echoes of that audience reaction because otherwise I wouldn't have known how to pitch it so specifically I guess."

The TV version received warm reviews from critics, with The Guardian describing it as "utterly riveting", while the Radio Times praised its "unusual, clever and brave depiction of a female world in disarray".

The Telegraph described the show as "a gloriously rude, and far funnier, update of Bridget Jones".