by If you’re still healing from One Direction’s eight-year breakup, you’re in luck – while the boys aren’t reuniting for one last tour anytime soon, they might Fangirls opening brand new in London is the next best thing.
The musical, by Australian screenwriter Yve Blake, premiered in its home country in 2019 to rave reviews and won numerous awards including the Sydney Theater Award for Best Production of a Major State Musical. A refreshed, souped-up version with an all-new cast (though still with the same Aussie flavours) is now coming to London for a run at Hammersmith’s Lyric Theatre.
When Blake and I talk, she and the cast are nearing the end of rehearsals: they’ve just finished running through a section of the show that turns the opera into a full-blown pop concert. The new range features LED floor panels, and “production value beyond my wildest dreams”. Theater choreographer Ebony Williams, who has collaborated with the likes of Rihanna and Beyonce, as well as choreographing Doja Cat’s world tour, is involved.
“Like the f**k!” Blake exclaims. “I feel like the production that’s coming together in London, which is a brand new production and completely reinvented… I feel like all these really smart people are making my dream show. As a writer, you are like a dad in a delivery room. There is nothing you can do. I sat there and cried some happy tears. That’s how I feel right now.”
Blake says the initial inspiration for Fangirls came from a real-life drama involving the band One Direction. In 2015, more or less out of the blue, Zayn Malik suddenly announced that he was leaving the group, and Directioners – to give the band’s fans their official title – went into mourning. Following the news, the phrase ‘I’m crying’ was tweeted at a rate of four to six times a second, and fans processing his departure was “global news,” says Blake.
“I was very interested because I noticed that journalists were trying the same words over and over again to refer to a group of One Direction fans that they thought were mostly teenagers,” says Blake. “The words they were getting were adjectives like: crazy, psychotic, hysterical, over the top, desperate, pathetic, and a bit much. I asked myself; would they reach the same adjectives if they were covering an upheaval in men’s sports?”
Although Fangirls takes some dark and surreal twists, with some satirical plot elements, it is – at its core – primarily a celebration of teenage fans, who are often belittled and underestimated. “They have such cultural and economic power, teenage girls. I think it’s so ironic that people turn a blind eye to them,” she says. “Why is it, culturally, something that teenage girls love, and men don’t… why is it associated with the feeling of cringe and being low-brow and embarrassed? I think we’ve seen so much division about this in the last year and a half with the Taylor Swift tour. I don’t know how I feel about the show premiering in 2019, but it feels as dated as ever.”
This is where the initial idea for Fangirls came from, with Blake’s own research guiding the play. Plus learn more about some weird and wonderful fan tributes – including one group of enterprising One Direction fans who quickly erected a commemorative plaque at the non-descript roadside location where Styles vomited on after a night out in 2014 – she was. pleasantly surprised at the sense of community she found over the immediate madness.
“I assumed this subculture would be young women competing with each other for male idols,” she says. “But quickly, I was like, oh, no, this is really a really beautiful space of friendship, chosen family and community.
“The more research I did, the more I kept learning about these healthy aspects of it. It should be said, the show is not uncritical: it’s about what it means to worship a celebrity in 2024, and what that does to our brains. The show is not afraid to look at the dark aspects of parasocial relationships. It’s interesting if you grow up in a world where you can see constant Instagram posts from your favorite celebrity, and you can’t comment and direct message them. In general, it’s so interesting that people are growing up with more and more perceived accessibility.”
The drama focuses on 14-year-old pop megafan Edna, who is obsessed with the successful wild boy band called Heartbreak Nation and, in particular, her famous heart Harry. While his name might remind someone of his solo stardom, Blake insists he’s “not Harry Styles. He has this great salad of so many different ideas, of different pop stars. It has a bit of BTS, a bit of Shawn Mendes, a bit of Justin Bieber, a bit of One Direction, a bit of Taylor Swift.”
While other fans are scrambling to get tickets for Heartbreak Nation’s upcoming tour, Edna is obsessed with a huge scandal she believes she has discovered with a close circle of fans online. forcing him to stay in the band. Edna and her internet friend Saltypringl want to help them out – and by the time the break comes around, things have taken a dark turn.
“The stakes get very high. In Act One, you have a 14-year-old girl, and everything in her life feels like life or death, which is what it feels like to be a teenager.” Blake decided it would be interesting to raise the drama accordingly during the second half. “It’s a show about big emotions, right? And so why not put things to rest?”
In Australia, audience members have approached Fangirls like a stadium pop concert, some even bringing hand-made signs to give waves to the fictional Heartbreak Nation. Blake has crossed everything that UK audiences respond to in a similar “wild” way, and is keen to offer an avenue, connected experience in the theatre.
“I fell in love with the theater when I was a teenager, but I remember going ‘Huh, I can’t imagine a world where I could take someone my age – who was like 15 – to the theatre.’ You have to sit there and be so polite. You can’t pee until it’s over. And you have to clap at the end, even if it’s good or bad. You have to be really quiet and still. Compare that to the energy of a gig where you get to sweat and scream, and there’s adrenaline….”
Many recent dramas bursting with pop, from Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow’s musical Six, to the Max Martin-powered And Juliet, seem interested in projecting a similar atmosphere.
“A generation of theater makers seems to be very interested in reimagining how theater spaces feel. I think it’s really exciting. It can feel really elitist,” she says. “I often say that I made this show as a gift to my 14-year-old self.”
Fangirls is at Hammersmith’s Lyric Theater until August 24
