ALL THE FRAUDULENT HORSE GIRLS

By Diana Simmonds

September 1 2024

ALL THE FRAUDULENT HORSE GIRLS, New Works Festival, Old Fitz Theatre, September 1-14, 2024. Photography by Robert Catto: above - Shirong Wu and Janet Anderson; below - Wu, Anderson, and Caitlin Amelia Kearney; below again - Anderson

For those who don’t understand how gangs of young girls can spend their school free time practicing horse riding skills – from the collected trot to full-on dressage manoeuvres – on foot and in the school playground, all I can say is: you have seriously missed out. But you’re in luck!

At just 55 minutes, All the Fraudulent Horse Girls, by Michael Louis Kennedy and directed by Jessica Arthur, is an astonishing piece of work that feels much bigger and more significant than you might at first imagine it could. That’s because it’s ostensibly about three of those girls most often referred to by their exasperated parents as “horse-mad”, but also rather more…

It begins with Audrey (Shirong Wu) at age 11, drawing the audience into that instantly recognisable age and stage of life when a girl can be at once obnoxious, pouty, defiant, cute, tough, fragile, lost, and lonely. However, not only is she a horse girl, but she can also connect telepathically with other horse girls all over the world. Including Matilde in France who doesn’t speak English, but that’s not the point.

Starting at a new school, Audrey tries to make friends with two other horse girls Audrey II and Audrey III (Janet Anderson and Caitlin Amelia Kearney) but they, being on home turf and as snotty as only young girls can be, give her the curt treatment and ride off at a sedate trot. In his writer’s notes, Kennedy says, “Far from the modern wellness movement’s categorisation of loneliness as being a personal failure to adequately love oneself, All The Fraudulent Horse Girls revels in loneliness as a messy, complex, legitimate emotion.” So there, Gwyneth Paltrow, stick your Goop and stay away from my little pony.

With three acts in 55 minutes, story, time, mind-state and location change rapidly and attention must be paid. As well as referencing seminal horse literature such as Black Beauty, National Velvet, Spirit, The Never Ending Story, and The Saddle Club, the action moves – via kicks in the head from upset equines and a horse named Tom Wayne Starr – to the forsaken deserts of Chihuahua, Mexico and the violently hyper-masculine novels of Western Americana. (Think Riders of the Purple Sage, Butcher’s Crossing, the Legends West trilogy, or even Blood Meridian.)

At the same time, it’s not unusual for horse girls to experience the first quivers of queerness while watching another girl performing a Piaffe, or Flying Change – or even a Diagonal – across the playground. The dawning of what others might call a crush is played out with hilarious tenderness in what is mostly a very funny example of profoundly meaningful nonsense. At the same time, horse liberation and our society’s unthinking dependence on glue is the provocative theme, as is the question of authorship and how much things cost in the real world.

All The Fraudulent Horse Girls is directed with deft clarity by Jessica Arthur and the three performances are: authentic full-on loser cute (Shirong Wu), delightfully noisome and authoritative (Caitlin Amelia Kearney), and subtly, fabulously mesmerising (Janet Anderson). Set and costumes by Paris Bell, with lighting by Emma Van Veen effectively make much out of almost nothing, and together with Madeleine Picard’s sound design, each element contributes to the pace and laugh-aloud fun of this new and exciting work. Recommended without reservation.