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You never forget your first love. And Edna loves Harry. Except Harry is the cheeky Northern member of a British boyband, a handsome void who has a propensity for flicking his lovely hair, and Edna is a 14-year-old schoolgirl who, in the words of her pal, writes “psycho fan fiction” and posts it on the internet. This is Fangirls, a new musical about the euphoria and misery of being a teenage girl with an obsession. Aptly, then, it’s the kind of show that inspires outsized feelings and ardent devotion. In the words of the fangirls, it left me “actually dead”.
Before opening in London, Fangirls premiered in Australia to five-star reviews, where it acquired its own set of fans who queued around the block for tickets. Writer Yve Blake, prompted by the global devastation wrought by Zayn leaving One Direction in 2015, felt compelled to write a show exploring who fangirls really are beneath the derisory idea of them as hysterical, silly and screechy. The result combines the acid wit of Six, the rebel streak of Matilda and the gooey heart of Everybody’s Talking About Jamie in order to create a musical that feels unlike anything else.
Its trick is to be much cleverer than you think it is (a bit like those fangirls themselves). Edna’s infatuation is complex. Yes, she has a picture of Harry on her pillow and spends too much time online thinking up fantasies where she and the star of fictional supergroup Heartbreak Nation run away together. But she’s actually worried that Harry has “depression eyes” and needs to be saved from the band. This is an online community where conspiracy theories proliferate – are queer relationships between band members being covered up? – dressed up in the guise of brave truth-telling and wanting happiness for their heroes.
The poignancy is in Edna’s clearly – but not that clear to her – parallel feelings of being lost and alone. Acutely painful to her is the fact that “only one person understands me… and he doesn’t know who I am”. Worse still is when her frenemy, Jules, discovers her fanfic blog and reads it out at school. Could it get worse? It does. When Heartbreak Nation finally announce tour dates in Sydney, the extortionate prices don’t match up to a schoolgirl’s pocket money. It’s all so unfair!
But alongside all of this is a raucous comedy that perfectly captures the hyperbole and bluntness of internet parlance. “You ruin my life and you make my day,” goes one lyric. “Use my guts as your spaghetti,” goes another. A video circulates of a girl being brought on stage and hugged by Harry – why does she get to go up there? “She’s terminally ill,” points out Edna’s friend Brianna. And Fangirls is often disarmingly dark as the lines between fan fiction and reality begin to blur, as being “actually dead” threatens to take on another meaning. If the second act doesn’t quite reach the heights of the first, it still manages to finish on a giddy, glitter-filled rush of brilliantly OTT satisfaction.
It must be fun to perform in a show this joyful and smart, and the cast are pure pleasure. Mary Malone uncovers a chance for comedy in almost all of queen bee Jules’s lines, Debbie Kurup is moving as Edna’s put-upon, worried mum, and Thomas Grant finds just the right level of pastiche in his preening Harry. But as Edna, Jasmine Elcock, who has only recently graduated, made me fangirl, uniting a knockout voice with a performance that manages to be relatable and absurd all at once. She’s the real hero we’re rooting for.
All the elements come together in Paige Rattray’s production to make Fangirls often feel like a real concert; it’s the first theatre show where I’ve ever been asked to wave my phone light in the air. And although Blake succinctly targets the cynical capitalist exploitation of teenage girls, this celebration of vulnerability, bravery and self-acceptance will win you over for something more. Fangirls doesn’t just evoke the untamed inner life of being a teen, it reclaims it – making you wistful for when you felt things so deeply that they actually hurt.
‘Fangirls’ at Lyric Hammersmith until 24 August
