A Scandal in Fitzrovia: James Fritz, The Flea, fetish masks and the rise of the Yard Theatre

On an ambitious history play and a Hackney pop-up that's become a beacon in London's theatre scene

The case of The Flea at The Yard. Photo Marc Brenner/

This week we’re in London. This edition is a little different from my usual midweek missive. While it’s my plan to continue writing a free weekly edition, it’s also my intention to start writing occasional bonus newsletters for my increasing number of paid subscribers. If you’d like to join their number, that would be lovely, but I recognise times are tight, so I will still keep as much of this free as I can. As ever, if you enjoy reading this newsletter, then please do consider sharing it with friends or colleagues or anyone else who might find it useful.

Sometimes when I’m in Edinburgh for the festival and feeling, shall we say, a little fringed out, a little depleted, I catch myself whispering “coffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffee” in an increasingly urgent way as I cut across the Meadows in search of caffeine. This is James Fritz’s fault.

Fritz’s 2015 play Ross and Rachel, which appropriated the name of one of TV’s best-known on-and-off again couples, dismantled the idea of the perfect couple. It was a sad, spiky and bleakly funny what-comes-next play that looks at what comes after you find ‘the One’. Vividly performed by Molly Vevers in a stifling box on Edinburgh’s George Square, it also included that sad, panicky mantra that has lodged in my brain ever since. 

Matt Trueman, in this Guardian piece, describes Ross and Rachel as a “dialogue for one; a monologue with two characters.”  Form has clearly always been a concern of Fritz; his plays also speak to contemporary concerns while never feeling like ‘issue’ plays. His 2014 play Four Minutes Twelve Seconds, which won him the Critics’ Circle Most Promising Newcomer award, explored what happened after a teenager’s sex tape that went viral. It was full of shifting sympathies and little narrative rug-pulls.

His play Parliament Square, which won the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting’s Judges’ Award, explores an act of protest in a formerly inventive, time-stretching way. His 2018 play Lava explores the emotional fallout between four people in the weeks after an asteroid devastates London. It sounds extreme – disaster movie stuff – but this is a play about grief and survival, about talking and not talking. One character, Vin, rendered mute through grief, uses text message to communicate, necessitating a more visual form of storytelling. In my review for The Stage of the original Nottingham production, I wrote “Fritz’s work pairs structural playfulness with emotional intelligence and inky wit.”  

His latest play The Flea, which in a recent edition of Fergus Morgan’s The Crush Bar, Fritz described as a “big, mad, messy conspiracy thriller”, feels in many ways like his most ambitious to date.