A famous song once said, “just be yourself / don’t ever change your style,” and that life should be, “fun for everyone”. All the Fraudulent Horse Girls, like this famous ode, pays tribute to the Horse Girls of the world, and at its core is the energy and transcendence of that iconic tune from the hit series The Saddle Club.

But Horse Girls is not merely just hay fodder for Saddle Club fanatics. Michael Louis Kennedy peppers his script with equine intertextualities from Black Beauty, National Velvet, Spirit, The Never Ending Story, as well as an extensive repertoire of references from Western American frontier fiction of the late 20th century.

Shirong Wu in All The Fraudulent Horse Girls. Photo © Robert Catto

I hear you ask, what exactly is a “Horse Girl”? The answer to that is more than a trivial, ‘someone who likes horses’. No, according to Kennedy, the desire to be a Horse Girl goes deeper, and director Jessica Arthur takes this madness and gallops with it toward madcap mayhem. Horse Girls, is in short, an uplifting ode in itself, one saying, “hello world, this is me”.

Horse Girls is...