This article contains major spoilers for Fleabag: Seasons One and Two.
Over the past few years, I haven’t met a single person who hasn’t consumed Fleabag in one way or another. Whether through the TV show or the original play, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s work has impacted our culture in a number of unexpected ways. Like many, I was consumed by the show – rewatching it endlessly, obsessing over that one jumpsuit and planning numerous ways of embedding it into my personality. No matter how it happened, the story of an unapologetically messy woman appealed to me in ways that I hadn’t foreseen.
Fleabag, as a character, is not a good person. The TV show and the script go a long way to make this clear. Yet even so, she is likeable; I couldn’t help but be charmed by her mistakes and odd sense of humour. She felt attainable, in a weird way – she looked for love in the wrong places and made things worse for herself more than she made things better. But she still tried.
As you may have guessed by now, I bought the book. Buying scripts has been a passion of fans for quite a while now: The Guardian reported that the script for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child became the fastest selling play script in 2016. I can’t speak for every single person who bought Fleabag: The Scriptures, but for me, it was about getting to know Fleabag more. Reading her words offered a way to gain a better understanding of who she was.
When reading the script I wasn’t expecting anything particularly shocking. There were a few pages where I realised that, despite multiple rewatches, I had misheard entire lines; there were even a few scenes that I had misinterpreted until seeing the notes accompanying them. My opinions about Fleabag stayed relatively the same: a weird combination of kinship and sympathy that I have yet to untangle completely. But the character that ended up surprising me was the Godmother.
Fleabag’s Godmother was her mother’s best friend who had entered into a relationship with Fleabag’s father after the death of Fleabag’s mother. In the show, Olivia Coleman does a fantastic job in making you dislike her character. The Godmother is, as Fleabag herself asserts, not evil. Any malicious action she takes can arguably be justified as a sort of retaliation to something Fleabag herself did prior to that.
Even so, the woman is thoroughly unlikeable when first watching. There are a few instances that come to mind here. For example, in Season One she constantly seems shocked that Fleabag is dating a man she perceives to be incredibly handsome. It’s more than that though; when watching the show from Fleabag’s perspective, it feels as though the Godmother goes out of her way to insult Fleabag and make her feel inferior.
Reading the script gave me a different perspective, though. I have no shame in admitting that, when consuming anything, I feel a strong level of loyalty to the main character. It’s a logical path to me – the main character is more often than not the protagonist and driving force of the story, and when seeing things from their perspective it’s easier to feel sympathy for them.
I think what altered my view on the Godmother-turned-stepmother was the ability to see her words instead of Coleman’s facial expressions. As I mentioned before, Coleman did a phenomenal job in this role – however, thanks to her efforts, a part of me feels as though I lost an opportunity to feel sympathy for this character. When reading the script, I was overcome with a strange sense of guilt as I realised that this woman was also suffering.
I don’t know if this was Waller-Bridge’s intention but when reading the script I couldn’t help but recognise some of my own anxiety responses in the Godmother. For the first time, I took a serious moment to examine her position. In the fourth episode of the second season, there is a scene in which Fleabag laments about looking too good at her mother’s funeral. While the majority of this scene is played for laughs, there is a moment towards its end where Fleabag insinuates to her sister that their Godmother is shameless for going after their dad, right then and there. While Claire criticises her sister for thinking the worst of people, Fleabag is proven somewhat right by the two eventually coupling up after the funeral.
To Fleabag, this seems like a terrible course of action, but I couldn’t help but notice how that course of action wouldn’t seem very out of place for Fleabag herself. Fleabag too became involved with a man who was in a relationship with her best friend – the main difference being that the Godmother engaged in this relationship after her best friend’s death instead of before.
The show makes many allusions to the fact that Fleabag is very similar to her mother in a number of ways. Out of everyone, she seems to struggle the most visibly with her grief at her mother’s loss. Her father references this by saying that she has a bigger capacity for love than most and that’s why it hurts her so much. Yet, something that was more interesting to observe was the similarities between Fleabag and her Godmother.
Both women seem to be adrift in life, searching for love in whatever shape they can find it. A woman going after the widower of her best friend may seem like a completely unjustifiable act by most people’s standards, but there is also an argument that it was an act of desperation. Fleabag, we are shown time and time again, is incredibly lonely, almost shockingly so. The Godmother’s pursuit of Fleabag’s father can be read as her being a bad best friend to Fleabag’s mother, but you could also argue that she loved her friend so intensely that she was willing to hold onto her in any way possible.
While I don’t doubt that she did care for Fleabag’s father, it is very telling that she did not remember his name on their wedding day. Rather than viewing her as a shameless woman who went after a man because she wanted him, it seems instead that she wanted to cling to her best friend, in any way she knew how.
Additionally, when it comes to the memory of her best friend, she seems almost possessive, even without realising it. I think this is best represented by the infamous gold statue which the Godmother creates. Although it is not until the end of the show that we learn the statue was based on Fleabag’s mother, the artistic piece proves to be a point of contention between the two characters throughout the show. Fleabag initially takes it as an act of impulsive pettiness and over the course of the show it becomes a symbol of power for the two. The intention behind Waller-Bridge including this statue in the story is up for debate, but it is very telling that Coleman’s character refers to the piece as priceless. Significantly, almost every member of the family has something to do with the statue in one way or another. Moreover, at the end of the season, in a final moment of victory, Fleabag steals the statue once more, after giving it back to the godmother as a wedding gift.
In a way, the statue represents the all-encompassing grief the two women feel and the way they choose to deal with it. Fleabag returning the statue to the Godmother was a symbol of her blessing for the union, but her stealing it back also served to show that she didn’t want the memory of her mother in that space. Yet the Godmother having such a piece in the first place, in her almost sacred art studio, indicates a desire to keep this lost friend of hers close.
The scene that first inspired this line of thinking was that of the remembrance held in Fleabag’s childhood home. In this scene it may seem like the Godmother is trying to cut the memories short, inserting herself in every way possible, leaving the flowers that Claire brought outside the house. But on reading this scene, all I could see was a woman doing her best to hold together on an incredibly painful day. Even if it came out all wrong.
At first appearance, the Godmother seems an unkind woman who is inserting herself into the life of her dead best friend. She aims hurtful comments at Fleabag and appears to be trying to replace a woman who she rarely even mentions on-screen. But is it so surprising that she should lash out at the person who most reminds her of her best friend? At the near constant reminder that her best friend is no longer with her?
The Godmother, like all the characters in Fleabag, is by no means perfect. She does hurtful things throughout the show and is hardly portrayed as the person most people want to be around. But, rather than see her as a villain, I think it is possible to see her as a woman struggling to deal with the loss of her best friend. She may be making mistakes in how to handle this grief, but they are her mistakes. Just like Fleabag, she is struggling to deal with her emotions and I think she should be given just as much grace as the titular character.