‘What makes a fringe show a hit?’: Hannah Maxwell’s darkly meta riff on Fleabag and Baby Reindeer
English theatremaker Hannah Maxwell brought two shows to this year’s Adelaide Fringe. While BABYFLEAREINDEERBAG satirises the creative and commercial pressures of the Fringe circuit, the more personal My Gay Lady is experiencing them firsthand.
One day during the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe, Hannah Maxwell faced a grim but not entirely common predicament: only two tickets had been sold for her next performance, and the temptation to cancel was strong.
Maxwell decided to press on despite the slim pickings, but when she took the stage to deliver Nan, Me & Barbara Pravi, she was shocked to find writer, actor and Fleabag star Phoebe Waller-Bridge staring back at her.
In Fringe circles, Waller-Bridge’s trajectory – taking Fleabag from a one-woman show at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe to a smash hit TV series – is a dream scenario. At first, Maxwell wasn’t sure how to process a room in which Waller-Bridge comprised half the crowd.
“It was a very weird show as I couldn’t make eye contact with her the whole time,” Maxwell tells InReview. “I had a huge cry on my producer as soon as I went offstage at the end, then we took a photo with her. She said she loved it.”
This year, Maxwell has been in Adelaide with two new shows, one of which tips its hat to Waller-Bridge’s crossover success – and its influence on screens and stages.
When audiences enter BABYFLEAREINDEERBAG, Maxwell greets them with clipboard in hand as if they’re entering a focus group session. The group faces a unique challenge: helping Maxwell retool their next Fringe show for Waller-Bridge levels of success.
Maxwell says the show was inspired by “losing a lot of money touring my last show, [and] realising I need my next show to be a smash hit to be financially viable”. In the performance, a clipboard-toting Maxwell pitches three premises to audiences: ‘The One About My Dad’, ‘The One About Heartbreak’, and ‘The One About The End of the World’.
“[I was] thinking about what true story from my life would be most Netflix-adaptable, and then thinking what an absurd way that is to think about your own life.”
The show’s title also invokes Richard Gadd’s Emmy Award-winning Baby Reindeer, which also began life at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019. While Gadd’s story fictionalises his own experience of stalking and sexual assault, Maxwell also riffs on other common tropes and traumas frequently found on the Fringe circuit.
“I think if you go to Edinburgh Fringe regularly you hear discussions about what is in vogue in any given year,” she says. “There was a load of shows about death one year. Dead dads is sort of a cliche thing people cite. I don’t know what this says about Fringes, makers or audiences, other than that shows beget shows.”
Maxwell says the success of shows like Fleabag and Baby Reindeer in making the leap from stage to screen reflects what audiences often hope to find at these festivals.
“I think it demonstrates that audiences have a definite interest in and appetite for intimate stories which paint a detailed picture of a person’s life. Most of the time they will only access these through televisual versions, but fringe theatre is full of them.”
While Waller-Bridge and Gadd represent rare success stories, Maxwell also explores the offstage grind that defines the Fringe experience for many performers (“Including but not limited to rushing about doing your own tech, being crippled by self-doubt, and losing a tonne of money,” she adds.)
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Maxwell has been living that experience on and off stage this Adelaide Fringe, with BABYFLEAREINDEERBAG one of two shows she’s brought to Adelaide. There’s also I, AmDram, Maxwell’s first show which has now been buffeted by many of the Fringe challenges BABYFLEAREINDEERBAG satirises – including rebranding to the slightly less enigmatic title My Gay Lady mid-season.
“I, AmDram was my first show, about amateur dramatics in England, which my family have been obsessed with for four generations,” she explains. “I re-named it My Gay Lady to see if that landed better with Australian audiences.
“I guess performing I, AmDram is the real experience that BABYFLEAREINDEERBAG riffs on,” she says, noting that the latter show includes Maxwell sharing ticket sale settlements and review quotes with the audience. “BABYFLEAREINDEERBAG tries to get the audience to help me develop a show that will be successful in a way I, AmDram is never going to be.”
Maxwell says performing two shows at once brings many challenges, from rising costs and tentative audiences to staving off bronchitis and scurvy while living on a “fringe diet of beer, cigarettes and poffertjes”.
“Also not accidentally saying one line from one show in the other one,” she adds.
Despite My Gay Lady’s slow start, Maxwell has enjoyed her time in Adelaide, with “warm and receptive” audiences and an invitation to tea with the governor. While she plan to “sleep for a month” when it’s over, it isn’t just coffee and poffertjes that keeps her keeps performing – even when only a handful of tickets have been sold.
“I think it’s a theatricalisation of the feeling of getting to know someone,” she says of the Fringe format. “Unsure if you’re going to get along, sharing some laughs, a well-timed overshare, finding points of resonance and connection.”
As for Maxwell’s brush with Waller-Bridge at the Edinburgh Fringe? Maxwell tweeted the photo, which went viral and soon her swap a mostly empty Fringe venue for the TV news.
“Sold out the second half of the run,” Maxwell says.
Hannah Maxwell will perform My Gay Lady at The Barbara Hardy Garden at Holden Street Theatres until Sunday March 22. Maxwell will also perform BABYFLEAREINDEERBAG at Qtopia Sydney from March 25 – 28.
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