Photo by Robert Catto- @robertcatto on Instagram, Threads, and Twitter, @robertcattophotographer on Facebook.
Miss out on ponying up to ALL THE FRAUDULENT HORSE GIRLS at the Old Fitz and you should be horsewhipped.
This side saddle reality addled story is a bare back bonkers ride into equine quirk, an unstable nostalgia of stables, stirrups and straw, from multiple neighbouring narratives.
Initially, we meet an eleven year old girl telepathically linked to all the other horse girls in the world. She is into all things equine; The Saddle Club, Westerns, Black Beauty, steeds, stallions and Spirit of Cimmaron.
She yearns to be a riding companion of her school’s only other horse girls, becoming the Fourth Horsewoman of the Apoplectic, but she is cruelly shunned. So she horses around with a fetlock fantasy, kicking off a chain reaction that sends her from suburban Sydney deep into the vast expanse of the American West and south of the border in a surreal reverse cowgirl, sorta.
Complete with acapella Morricone accompaniment, rudimentary horse couture- big hats, brain buckets, jeans and jodhpurs, no chaps, ALL THE FRAUDULENT HORSE GIRLS is a rawhide raucous rollicking girls own adventure that gallops along with side splitting asides and deadpan deliveries. This is the glue that holds the show together as it hoofs its way through an hour of lassoing laughs from coltish comedy.
Written by Michael Lewis Kennedy and directed by Jess Arthur, ALL THE FRAUDULENT HORSE GIRLS boasts a robust cast of bronco busting performers who generously do not rein in their characters. There’s so much horse shoe and horse shit you don’t have time to think, just sit back and enjoy the ride.
Sublimely silly, radiantly ridiculous, ALL THE FRAUDULENT HORSE GIRLS leads you to drink from various literary troughs from The Never Ending Story to All The Pretty Horses, and if that’s not enough incentive to saddle up, get thee to a knackery.
