Fleabag: Welsh-speaking version of play to tour

The Theatr Clwyd production of Fleabag is on tour in Wales until the end of September

She is the filthy, funny and unfiltered character who turned her creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge into a huge star.

But changes to the Welsh language version of Fleabag include an inability to have sex in her mother tongue.

Writer Branwen Davies put her spin on the heroine of two BBC TV series with the approval of her famous creator.

This Fleabag has a Welsh mother and English father and lives in Liverpool - but unlike the original she has no "hot priest" (offeiriad ffit) to lust after.

Davies said as a "hardcore fan" she gave "a very happy, excited squeal" when she was asked to do the new version.

"There are no plays like this in the Welsh language, and I feel there's room to explore and give it a Welsh flavour," she said.

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The Theatr Clwyd production is touring Wales during August and September.

"It really felt as if Phoebe had crawled into my brain and dared [to] say things I don't dare," says Branwen Davies

"I remember seeing it back in 2013 and reading it straight after… and kind of going 'Oh, why didn't I write this?'

"It really felt as if Phoebe had crawled into my brain and dared [to] say things I don't dare say out loud. So yes, what a play."

Davies told BBC Radio 4's Front Row that it was originally "very middle class London and I'm obviously definitely not".

She said the obvious answer would have been to site it in Wales, but instead she chose Liverpool, where her Fleabag - originally from Bangor in Gwynedd - went to university and stayed.

"I thought there was something quite interesting about having a Welsh-language play set in a city outside Wales.

"As a Welsh speaker wherever you go will find another Welsh speaker who will know you, your brother, your mother, your grandmother, your neighbour - there's always that connection which sometimes is lovely, sometimes a little bit suffocating.

"Away from Wales you tend to get that freedom to reinvent yourself a little bit."

The story is the same, but "relocating it and making Fleabag a Welsh speaker has a different nuance, has different layers, it just heightens it a little bit. This gives it a Welsh stamp, a Welsh flavour".

She also made all the men in her version English.

"The idea was that this Fleabag can't have sex in Welsh. So she gets to reinvent herself and live this fantasy, put this front on in English.

"Only when she's most vulnerable and when she's most honest with herself she slips back into her mother tongue.

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"Her mother in this version is a Welsh speaker and her father is from Liverpool. So she's had that joy of a bilingual upbringing and as a Welsh speaker I'm constantly flipping from Welsh to English and I think that's really rich and interesting, and I wanted to convey that.

"When we see her unravelling, when we see her admit to her own emotions and feelings and failures, when she's confessing the intimate moments to the audience, that's the real, honest her."

Waller-Bridge approved the Welsh version and she was "so generous, so friendly, and very open to suggestions".

In an early draft, which did not make the final cut, her Fleabag is in an interview in English and she says something under her breath in Welsh.

"But the interviewer turns around and speaks Welsh to her, so she's caught out - something that happens to Welsh speakers quite often."

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