All The Fraudulent Horse Girls ☆☆☆
Just as the opening of the Elizabeth Line has nudged The Glory Pub onto a few more people’s destination lists then this quirky, teaching fable, with a raucous overtone and a psychological undercurrent, might be a timely elbow for those not familiar with The Glory’s gloriously diverse curation of queer voices.
Eleven-year-old awkward Audrey (played gender blind by different actors as the piece progresses) is deeply obsessed with horses. With horse names, horse merchandising, horse books, and horse movies. No one could love them more. Particularly as she has never known one to get ill and need an operation, like her one friend Maddy, or to die during an operation, like her grandmother. ‘She died in the middle of it, and i felt like that wasn’t supposed to happen’ is her darkly comic conclusion. Horses are everything to her, because, as she has never owned one and probably never will, they are the untainted vessel for all her hopes. And so, they get comically jumbled up in her fever dreams, remixing bits of the movies and books she has read.
All the Fraudulent Horse Girls (written by Michael Louis Kennedy and directed by Charles Quittner) is an ode to those kids, us kids, who didn’t yet know that making friends was a skill to be learned rather than a judgment on their value. Those kids, us kids, who didn’t yet understand what skills were, so took an alternate route of building masses of knowledge in their passion area. Those kids, us kids, who didn’t yet know where to fit in. And the Mean Girls/Boys/Non-binaries who made their lives hell on the journey
If the above does not sound like the most cocktail-friendly content, then fear not. All the Fraudulent Horse Girls is soused with a double shot of humour, and only a small dash of bitters. It is manic, over the top, a little bit clever, and with a few laughs that will spit your drink right back into your martini glass. The cutting humour of Audrey’s unironic belief that ‘‘Horses are the glue that binds us all together’, isn’t lost to the ears of the more worldly audience. Indeed, just as you think the show is over a new layer of satire is added when ‘the writer’ breaks with the curtain call to make a heartfelt plea to end ‘the subjugation, nay (neigh!) murder of horses’ and promotes their equine GoFundMe/Kickstarter/FacebookFundraiser. It is awkwardness, a central theme of the piece, distilled to perfection.
*as tonight has brought together an obsession with horses and the Glory’s cocktail specials you might be interested to know that the word cocktail originated from the practice of docking racehorse tails for superior performance. Queerguru believes a margarita has a similar enhancing effect.
Review by ANDREW HEBDENQueerguru Contributing Editor ANDREW HEBDEN is a MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES graduate spending his career between London, Beijing, and NYC as an expert in media and social trends. As part of the expanding minimalist FIRE movement, he recently returned to the UK and lives in Soho. He devotes as much time as possible to the movies, theatre, and the gym. His favorite thing is to try something (anything) new every day.
