Absurd, optimistic and joyful, Bryony Byrne’s Fan/Girl is a tongue-in-cheek ride through British adolescence against a backdrop of nineties football. With Fringe First winning director Ben Target’s comic touch, the show playfully uses audience interaction, 90s bangers, stupid comedy, clowning and drag to make you burst into laughter and leave sobbing.
Bryony Byrne, at age 36, reveals that conversations with childhood friends sparked an exploration into why all the girls she knew stopped playing football in their teens. She takes us back to 1998, her last day of primary school, and looks at what happened. With the help of her spirit guide, Eric Cantona, Bryony invites the audience to play with her, to rekindle the sense of joy she found playing football. As Bryony enters secondary school, microaggressions and misogyny begin to surface. How can you best fit in? Is it true sport will ‘break your hymen’? Bryony begins to break down and the audiences’ complicity is turned on its head, with gender expectation, exclusion from sport and female rage all topics that surface and simmer.
Female football is finally on the rise but, even now, only 63% of schools in the UK offer girls’ football in PE and only 41% of them offer it as a girls’ extra-curricular activity, according to The FA. All our current Lionesses had to fight to continue to play football and many took second jobs. Shaking off the cobwebs of time and experience, Fan/Girl reclaims some of the easy, untarnished love for the game from Bryony’s youth.
Bryony comments, Football wasn’t offered at my secondary school (a single-sex state school), it wasn’t offered to girls at my friends’ schools (co-ed state schools with outstanding sports facilities), and it just slipped out of our lives. Making this show has been a true joy because I’ve been able to reconnect both with my love for sports and with some of my oldest friends. Fan/Girl reawakens something that’s lain dormant for many people for a long time. It celebrates those things that we’ve forgotten we’ve lost – the freedom and joy we found in childhood before the world began to organise activities in ways that closed them off to certain groups or people. It reminds people how much more fun it is when we all get to play together.
Previously performed at Soho Theatre, London as part of Soho Rising; The National Football Museum in Manchester; Here-After at The Crocodile in Seattle, USA; PDA Space Los Angeles, USA; Pleasance Theatre and Rosemary Branch Theatre, London.
