How Writer Yve Blake Turned Directioners Into The Subjects Of Theatre With A Capital A T

When Yve Blake met a 13-year-old girl who said, with full sincerity, that she was going to marry Harry Styles, at first, she couldn’t help but laugh.

“I know you don't think I'm serious, but I'm going to show you,” Blake recalls the girl saying. “I will be with him, because I love him so much that I would slit someone's throat to be with him.”

The ferocity and the high, almost operatic stakes of that young fan’s devotion stirred a “morbid curiosity” in writer and comedian Blake. From that fascination, which spurred her to research ‘fan girls’ obsessively for years, interviewing over 100 young fans, her next project formed, the new musical Fangirls, which premieres at Brisbane Festival in September, before moving south to Sydney’s Belvoir.

Fangirls tells the story of 14-year-old Edna (Blake), a diehard fan of the biggest boy band in the world, True Connection – and in particular its lead singer, her 'soulmate', Harry, played by The Voice’s Aydan Calafiore.

Through the musical, Blake wants to unpack how the world cringes at “young female enthusiasm”. 

“All my assumptions about fan girls were built on society-wide prejudices towards young women when they express enthusiasm,” Blake explains. “And what I realised is that the world looks very differently at a group of young boys screaming their lungs out at a football match then it does at a group of young fan girls screaming their lungs out at a Bieber concert.”

As a society, we’ve long dismissed the passions of teen girls. Words like ‘vapid’ are used to describe young women and their interests, whether they’re into boy band BTS or fashion magazines or romance novels. And the way that teen girls may express that interest is often negated as ‘hysterical’. That logic – the distinction between high- and lowbrow culture – hasn’t applied in the same way to the hobbies of straight men of the same age group. 

“I want to know why it is that we judge young women as crazy based on a definition of what's reasonable which is shaped by what we think it's reasonable for young men to do,” Blake poses. 

Young men in our society are socialised to conceal their feelings – to perform a kind of socially sanctioned masculinity – Blake notes, while women are encouraged to be super analytical, emotional and dramatic. 

“The stories that we largely tell young women about, with aspirational figures in them that they can relate to, involve high drama. This is an outdated reference, but it's Twilight, where you fall in love with a vampire and they might kill you!” Blake exclaims. 

“If you're a young woman and the world is telling you to fixate on love, then it makes sense if you've got a pop star singing about first love, they go, 'Yes, this is exactly what I'm interested in and interested in imagining and exploring.'”

So Blake herself is imagining and exploring that world of fan girls – but in a relatively highbrow space, the theatre with a capital T. To blend those two things together, she decided to create a show on “fan girls’ own terms” – it’s part pop concert, part grimy warehouse rave, part house of worship. 

“If I was going to write about teenage girls, then this show needed to feel like the best pop concert you've ever been to,” Blake says. “But I also wanted the show to express some of the ideas that people already have about fan girls, for example, that they're scary, by containing this energy that was kind of a little bit dark and twisted. So there's times when the show kind of feels like a scary, dirty warehouse rave. 

“But also I wanted to reflect the devotion and the worship that I was seeing from fan girls. And so there's a sneaky girls' choir in the show, and it kind of also sounds like the church of Harry Styles.”

The aim is to effectively trick people into siding with the fan girls of the title. “[Fangirls] appears to kind of make fun of and satirise fan girls, only to smuggle them into your heart and make you see them in a way you didn't know was possible.”

Any digs at her subjects aren’t coming out of a place of maliciousness, but rather as a way to help potentially critical audiences come on board – people who may think they have “no shared ground” with fan girls. 

“I want like a 70-year-old man – my dad is a 70-year-old man – to be able to sit in the audience and blubber in tears at a 14-year-old girl singing about her experience, because I helped him figure out how it also applies to him."

Blake recalls lurking outside the stage door of Belvoir Downstairs in 2008 and asking the cast of Simon Stone’s Spring Awakening to sign a postcard from the show. That’s the closest she herself – now 26 – has ever come to a fan girl moment. 

Still, much of what Blake has experienced in her own life, from living as a teen girl, has fed into the writing of Fangirls. 

“My experience of being a teenage girl and turning into an adult woman was to have the world suddenly give me a list of things that I needed to change or maintain in order to be beautiful, and therefore to be correct. I felt like the world was constantly telling me through a million messages that the true value I should be cultivating is my beauty.

“I can completely understand why if you're a 14-year-old girl grappling with that, if you find something that speaks to you, like lyrics that talk about a story you can connect with, I can completely understand why screaming your lungs out with ecstasy and joy is like such a deserved reprieve from the constant pressure that the world is putting you under. 

“I feel like we twist girls into these pretzels of insecurity by telling them how not to be. So I think it makes a lot of sense that girls wanna literally scream their puberty out to songs, because they're really being put through it.” 

One way fan girl culture has been twisted is to talk about the extraordinary buying power of young women or the way bands beloved by teens can end up dominating the charts. But Blake’s idea of what gives these young women a “superpower” zeroes in on something larger than commercial interests. 

“They know how to do something most of my adult friends have no idea how to do, and that's love something without fear or apology,” Blake says. 

Often the sensationalised representations of the way teen girls relate to each other centres on competitiveness and aggression, the ‘mean girls’ stereotype. But Blake’s experience speaking to those women doesn’t venture into that kind of toxic territory. 

“The majority of the fan girl behaviour I observed is actually just young women looking out for each other. And that's kind of what the world needs more of, right?” 

It’s Blake’s hope that people come away from her musical reconsidering the kind of language they use to talk about young women loving things. She wants to dispel the idea of the ‘psycho’ or ‘insane’ or ‘scary’ fan girl and to replace it with something much more positive. 

“It would be fabulous if people saw this show… and they looked more generously at the image of a young woman screaming her lungs out and saw it for the powerful moment that it is.” 

Fangirls plays from 7 Sep at Billie Brown Theatre and from 12 Oct at Belvoir St Theatre.