Proposal

Fleabag was initially created as a one-woman show by Pheobe Waller-Bridge at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2013 where it was warmly received. In 2016, the BBC and Amazon Prime premiered the first season of the television show of the same name. The first season expanded on many of the same plot points as the play and continued to star Waller-Bridge, although now alongside a large cast. In 2019, the second season was aired on the same channels which introduced new characters and plots. The show won numerous awards, including Emmys for outstanding comedy series, best lead actress, and best writing, both for Waller-Bridge. The scripts for both the one-woman play and the television show have been published and are widely available although neither references the other.

This comparing the changes from a play to a television show would explore the relationship between highly visual mediums like film and television and less visual stagings, like the play. In comparing the two texts in this way, a reader could better understand how Waller-Bridge constructed and revised the text to suit the medium and to better communicate her messaging. In my proposed edition, both scripts would be in conversation in a parallel edition.

This edition would be digitized, which would allow for the edition of multimedia features, such as clips of the productions. Hypertext would also be utilized to connect across the scripts. I approached the editing without privileging either published text over another, allowing for textual plurality. Instead, each text will be presented in full, with footnotes and hypertext to contextualize and explain changes. These notes would include changes found in live performances of the play or other variations not accounted for in the published scripts of either text. With a living and active author who was the main contributor to both scripts which are suited to different mediums and lengths, creating a “difinitive” verison of the script would limit and constrain the writing too much.