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Theatre-watch: All the Fraudulent Horse Girls

An equine fantasy that takes us on an odyssey from Sydney to Mexico.

Means Happy

Jul 31, 2024 — 5 min read

Written by Michael Louis Kennedy, All the Fraudulent Horse Girls is an equine fantasy that follows 11-year-old Audrey who is telepathically linked to all the other horse-girls in the world.

After an attempt to liberate a police horse goes haywire, we are thrust from suburban Sydney to harsh desert Mexico for an unrelenting equestrian odyssey.

We caught up with Michael Louis Kennedy for a behind-the-scenes look at the production.

When did you first encounter the "horse girl" identity? Were you surrounded by horse girls at school?

I went to a primary school in a suburb called Eastwood in Sydney - not so far from where the show is set - and there was definitely at least one prominent horse girl in the class.

I won’t say her name but what I will say is that I have a clear memory of recognising even at the time that there was something a little bit off-kilter about the nature of her obsession.

This is not to say that I was looking from the in-group out at the folks on the fringes. I was absolutely a little gremlin too, but in a different way. The limits of weird kid solidarity are often arbitrary and brutal.

Why is Western Americana a cultural touchpoint that you're drawn to?

I’m really interested in Western Americana for loads of reasons.

Stylistically, a lot of it is really sparse and good quality sparse writing has a poetry that I find really stirring. It’s a real skill to say a lot with not much at all.

That being said, I also find it darkly funny because of how masculine and bleak a lot of it is. It feels like it’s a really good encapsulation of a certain type of male self-imposed suffering born of an inability or unwillingness to effectively communicate or bond with your peers.

I’m also interested in Americana of this variety because I think it has a very palpable relationship to frontier mythology and often positions people - or more specifically “Man” - as battling with the land, whether that’s the South of the United States, or Central America.

That sort of mythology invariably has to either ignore or exoticise the existing relationships between First Peoples and those same lands that don’t neatly fit that narrative of opposition.

Living in Australia, and writing about Australian children, there is a lot of synergy between those narratives and the colonial mythology imposed on Country in Australia as well.

You've said that this is a play that explores the complexity of loneliness - is focusing on something that you're passionate about an effective way of combating loneliness?

Honestly, no. I was very neurotically fixated on my special subjects - variously monsters, mythology, and gems - and they absolutely did not allow me to connect with anyone else.

I believe that the antidote to loneliness is community, and you could make an argument that finding community with peers who share your interests will help you, but in reality - particularly in school days - your access to people who share your interests is very limited and largely outside of your control.

Also, even if they do share your interests there’s no guarantee they’ll actually want to be your friend.

Part of the core tension of All The Fraudulent Horse Girls is that there are other horse girls in the school. They just don’t want to be friends with Audrey - our Horse Girl #1 - because she doesn’t dress and act the way that they want or expect.

Loser-on-loser violence is rife in the schooling system.

This is really hard on Audrey in the same way it’s hard on real kids. If she also had the language to connect with people outside of her special subject then the pool of potential friends and peers would be much bigger, but branching out like that and making those connections is difficult and scary, particularly when horses are your whole world.

Learning to meet people where they’re at, and show interest in their interests, even when they don’t align with your own - that’s the pathway out of loneliness. But it takes time and patience.

Do young queer boys have an identity that's available to them that's sort of equivalent to horse girl?

I don’t know that I would say that the Horse Girl identity is explicitly for queer girls. I think there’s probably quite a large contingent of proto-queer Horse Girls - I mean, Lucy Liu as Alex in the introductory montage of Charlie’s Angels; am I right, ladies?

However I think there’s also quite a large contingent of rich Horse Girls with fancy hair and access to riding lessons, particularly in private schools. I think that variety of Horse Girl is less likely to be queer and potentially makes the Horse Girl community not quite as safe for budding queers.

In much the same way I don’t know that there is a “queer boy” equivalent to Horse Girls. There is definitely a “boy” equivalent. I would say it’s Transport Boys. They’re usually fixated on either trains or planes. At my school, one of my classmates would routinely point at planes flying overhead, quote the flight number and the city in which it would ultimately land - like a really banal X-Man.

I think it’s pretty common that people come into their queerness after they’ve already found their early passions. Sometimes the passions and the queerness are complimentary and sometimes they’re not. If they’re lucky they will have found natural allies there already, but for many they need to find or re-find their tribe at the same time as they’re coming to know themselves.

What do you hope that people feel when they come to see We Are All The Fraudulent Horse Girls?

I want them to remember the agony and ecstasy of growing up. To be transported to their childhood and reflect on the acts of psychic violence we all wrought on one another in the pursuit of getting through the day.

I want them to think of Total Girl Magazine, wearing a short sleeve top over a long sleeve top and skirts over your jeans. If you’re Australian I want you to hear Strawberry Kisses by Nikki Webster like you’re gearing up for the Sydney Olympics and the world is exciting and full of promise.

I hope they delight in the weirdness, the queerness, the truly shocking amount of horse-media references, and remember what it’s like to yearn for companionship, and go through the painful process of learning how to find it.