‘The next Fleabag’: How Something Terrible became just the opposite

Imagine the feeling. You spend years trying to make it as a writer, eking out a living by editing other people’s scripts and teaching. Then, one glorious day, you find yourself with not one, but two critically acclaimed plays running consecutively in London. A serious newspaper proclaims you “The saviour of British theatre”. How marvellous is that?

“It felt amazing, it did,” says Marcelo Dos Santos, recalling the period in 2023 when Backstairs Billy, his play about the Queen Mother’s favourite aide, and Feeling Afraid As If Something Terrible Is Going To Happen, his one-man show about a stand-up comedian, both enjoyed successful runs. “I was also terrified, if I’m honest. But yes, there have been moments when I’ve thought ‘good lord, this is so far from where I’ve been’.”

Australian-born playwright Marcelo Dos Santos has been called “the saviour of British theatre”.Credit: Mike Massaro 

Equivocation is what you might expect from the 42-year-old Australian-born playwright. After all, he drew deeply on his own neuroses when writing Feeling Afraid As If Something Terrible Is Going To Happen, the most personal of his two hit plays. It stars Samuel Barnett (you may remember him from the stage and film versions of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys) as an angsty stand-up comedian trying to find Mr Right in all the wrong places: dating apps, clubs and late-night hook-ups. The play, which arrives in Australia in January, is by turns hilarious and heartbreaking; a fast, filthy treatise on intimacy, self-sabotage and the nature of comedy itself.

“I can handle rejection,” says the play’s protagonist in a characteristic moment of self-flagellation. “Honestly, I’m used to it. Rejection is actually my safe space. But as a rule, I like to get the rejection over as quickly as possible so I can get back to my healthy diet of Golden Girls reruns, hate-stalking famous people and masturbating to Czech twinks being pissed on.”

More than one review of the play (let’s call it Feeling Afraid … for the sake of brevity) described it as “the next Fleabag”. That’s partly because both works take a gleefully transgressive approach to sex and partly because Francesca Moody, the producer of the 2013 Edinburgh Festival Fringe version of Fleabag that put Phoebe Waller-Bridge on the path to fame, is also the producer of Dos Santos’ play.

The power of Moody’s imprimatur is undeniable. At 36, she is known for a hit rate (she also produced the stage version of Baby Reindeer, see below) that defies the odds. For the cognoscenti, making a beeline for the latest Francesca Moody show is a reliable way of navigating Edinburgh’s vast petri dish of talent.

Today, “the producer with the golden touch” – to quote another newspaper headline – is sitting next to Dos Santos in the boardroom of her offices near London’s Leicester Square. He’s quietly spoken, self-deprecating and wears round tortoiseshell glasses framed by a mop of dark curls. She’s to-the-point and chic with elegantly short hair and a giant polka-dot shirt buttoned at the neck.

With Fleabag and Baby Reindeer behind her, Francesca Moody’s hit rate defies the odds.Credit: Rich Lakos

Neither of them mind the comparisons between Feeling Afraid… and Fleabag. He’s an ardent fan of Waller-Bridge’s writing; Moody admits any perceived similarity helps sell tickets. “It gives the public an anchor point,” she says. “From a commercial point of view it’s quite helpful because Fleabag is so powerful.

“Feeling Afraid ... is funny and filthy and so is Fleabag,” she adds. “They’re completely different plays, but they are both about people who are using sex as a way to bury their feelings or their sense of who they are.”

Dos Santos was born in Sydney to a Brazilian father and an Australian mother. The relationship was short-lived and he and his mother, a teacher, moved to London when he was 10. Arriving at his primary school in south-west London with a pronounced Aussie accent, Dos Santos did everything he could to assimilate.

“What I didn’t realise at the time was that I had quite a lot of kudos coming from Australia and having that accent,” he says, laughing. “This was the peak Neighbours period. And I could surf!” He reckons his peripatetic childhood – he also spent some time in Brazil – had some advantages. “It probably made me tougher, more resilient and gave me observational skills. I think that’s where the writing comes from. I was often on the outside looking in.”

After studying English and drama at the University of Bristol, he began the uncertain life of a writer. There was a stint in the literary department of London’s Royal Court Theatre wading through unsolicited scripts, a few years running an independent theatre company and plenty of teaching and transcribing.

‘They’re completely different plays, but they are both about people who are using sex as a way to bury their feelings.’

Producer Francesca Moody

In 2020, he was on the verge of a breakthrough. His play Sharks was about to be announced by the Royal Court after several years of development. Then the pandemic struck, theatres closed and he was back to square one.

His response was to write his most personal work to date. The title Feeling Afraid ... comes from a National Health Service questionnaire probing people’s mental health. For Dos Santos it captured both his generation’s anxiety and the existential fear so prevalent in the early weeks and months of the COVID-19 outbreak. The other factors that shaped the play were wanting to work with Samuel Barnett – he’d met the actor at a workshop and found their sense of humour and neuroses “overlapped” – and the desire to tell the story of a gay man in his 30s navigating the dating scene.

Samuel Barnett in Feeling Afraid As If Something Terrible Is Going To Happen.Credit: Mihaela Bodlo

Dos Santos is in a relationship now, but he was an avid user of dating apps in his younger days. He says some horrifying anecdotes in Feeling Afraid … are drawn from experience, others are pure fiction. You’ll just have to guess if someone once asked him to be a naked sushi platter, an experience – in the play at least – that leads to the unpleasant realisation that supermarket sushi can have a disappointingly short shelf life.

Says Dos Santos: “My own experience of hook-ups is that in certain contexts, like on holiday, it’s totally fine and fun. But in your everyday life it can be quite brutal if what you’re actually wanting is love and connection.

“It’s tough constantly putting yourself out there. Sex is intimate, but my character often tries to override his instincts about things in order to appear a certain way. He wants to be relaxed about sex, to be sex-positive, and, yes, he wants to be independent. But his yearning for intimacy makes a certain kind of hook-up tough.”

Dos Santos quickly realised that a stand-up comedian was the perfect vehicle for the themes he wanted to explore. “With comedians you’re never sure what’s true and what isn’t – there’s an interesting theatrical game. I could also explore his need to make people laugh and the masks he hides behind.”

The resulting script struck an immediate chord with Moody when she read it on a beach while on holiday in Tenerife. Ten months later, the play opened in Edinburgh before transferring to London’s Bush Theatre. What draws her to a piece of writing?

“It’s just gut instinct,” she says. “And we also say the thing that is particular to our productions is that ‘the work doesn’t take itself too seriously, but there’s a seriousness to the work’. The intersection between comedy and tragedy is characteristic of the shows we’ve made generally.”

As I’m getting ready to leave, Dos Santos stops me to say how excited he is that Feeling Afraid... is going to be staged in Australia. “I’m quite close to my Australian family and I’ll be going out for a month,” he says. “I’m really looking forward to seeing what Australians make of it.”

Feeling Afraid ... is at Arts Centre Melbourne’s Fairfax Studio, January 14 to February 1, 2025, as part of Midsumma Festival, and the Sydney Opera House, February 5 to 23, as part of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival.

The Reindeer in the room

Richard Gadd and Jessica Gunning in a scene from the Netflix version of Baby Reindeer.Credit: Ed Miller/Netflix

It would be difficult to sit down with Francesca Moody and not discuss Baby Reindeer. Her hit production of Richard Gadd’s one-man show at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival Fringe paved the way for the wildly popular, wildly controversial Netflix series that is [as I write] still on course to face a multi-million dollar defamation lawsuit in the US. Moody was not involved in the small-screen version, but she has the stage rights to the show and has expressed an interest in bringing the stalker saga back to theatres.

“Richard and I are still very close,” she says. “I think he’s an amazing writer and a wonderful theatre-maker. I’d absolutely love to do the play again, but only when the time is right. Richard’s diary needs to be free, and we all need to feel comfortable presenting the show again. It would be a great cultural moment if we can make it happen.”

Baby Reindeer is, of course, a salutary lesson in the perils of putting a small theatre show (it was seen by just 84 people a night during its four-week Edinburgh Festival Fringe run) in front of a global streaming audience.

“Theatre is ephemeral, it happens and you leave,” agrees Moody. “It’s very different from a TV show where the audience is massive, and you can pause, rewind and study.”

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