It’s March 2015 and a bombshell has hit the world of pop: Zayn Malik is leaving One Direction. Fans, everywhere, are in crisis. Within an hour of the announcement #AlwaysInOurHeartsZaynMalik is trending worldwide on Twitter. Some claim to be in despair, crying at school, in cars, in toilets. What will happen to their favourite band now?
Although Yve Blake, who was 22 at the time, never identified as a Directioner, she remembers Malik’s departure from the band feeling cataclysmic. “It penetrated everything,” she says. She followed the story closely, watching the outcries of trauma and upset from a distance. She soon started to notice something else, however. “Even the mainstream news outlets were using really specific kinds of adjectives to describe the fans, who were obviously assumed to be young women,” she recalls. “They were ‘crazy’ and ‘over the top’, ‘desperate’, ‘psycho’, ‘pathetic’, ‘a bit much’.”
Blake began to wonder: would the same language be used to describe a similar event in a more male-dominated world such as sport? She was sure that a young male football fan screaming and crying at a lost match would be described as a vision of loyalty, devotion and passion. “The way the world talks about fangirls is a microcosm of the way the world talks about young women,” she says. “To fangirl is to love something without apology. It is something most of my adult friends have no idea how to do. I thought there was something in this extremity of feeling,” she says.
She started meeting fangirls – young women who knew intimate details about the lives of pop stars like Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber and Harry Styles – and spoke to them in detail about it. Many shared stories of finding their closest friends through online fan forums. Others spent their teenage years writing pages of fan fiction or masterminding One Direction fan accounts that tweeted regular news updates and reached people all over the world. “I was so impressed by the executive levels of organistation it took,” Blake says. “I think everyone knows what it feels like to be a teenager and be obsessed with something. It feels like a private room that you’ve discovered that you can escape to.”
Almost a decade on from these initial conversations, Blake is sitting across from me in the cafe at west London’s Lyric Hammersmith where her musical Fangirls, directly inspired by the hundreds of people she met, will make its UK debut. Fangirls has already found success in Blake’s home country, Australia, with a run at the Sydney Opera House, a national tour and several awards under its belt.
The story follows Edna, a 14-year-old diehard fan of the world’s biggest boyband, Heartbreak Nation. She falls in love with the band’s lead singer – aptly named Harry. The musical unpicks what it means to be a fan and to exist as part of a fan community or “fandom”. The key moment, however, arrives when Edna’s friend calls her “immature” because of her obsession. “I think I was drawn to it because it is really vulnerable and exposing to just openly love something – inspiring even,” says Blake.
Before Fangirls, Blake worked as an actor doing solo fringe shows, as well as developing her own plays as part of the young writers programme at London’s Royal Court theatre (she’d moved to England to study at Central School of Speech and Drama). Her big break came in 2016 when she applied for an Aus $10,000 scholarship in Sydney backed by the actor Rebel Wilson at the Australian Theatre for Young People. “I was 22 and I just said, ‘If you give me this money I will write a whole two and a half hour musical about fangirls.’ And then, miraculously I got it.”
There was a small problem. Blake didn’t actually know how to write a musical. “I don’t play any instruments,” she admits. “I just spent a year on YouTube learning how to produce music and about musical theatre structure,” she says. By the end of the year, Blake had enough material to put on a 40-minute concert-style presentation of six songs. “Soon I was being contacted by producers around the world, saying: ‘Are you the girl with the fangirl show?’”
Fangirls had its world premiere in Brisbane in 2019 and the response was overwhelming. The musical even gathered its own community of devotees who turned up, dressed in full costume, holding signs for the band True Connection (Heartbreak Nation’s original name in the Australian shows). In lockdown, they shared TikTok videos of them singing songs from the show and hosted online slideshows to analyse the characters. “I hoped people would get it, but I just couldn’t believe the reaction,” Blake says.
The London run has a lot to live up to. Blake insisted Paige Rattray, the director from the Australian production, come over as part of the new team – and they’re joined this time by the Hollywood choreographer Ebony Williams. Williams, who originally trained as a ballet dancer at the Boston Ballet School, fell in love with Fangirls on her first listen to the soundtrack. “I heard the music and I thought: yes, I have to do this,” she says.
Williams flew in from the US only a few days before we speak, and has a no-time-to-waste attitude. “I don’t pay attention to the clock, I just think every job is important,” she says. This approach has certainly worked for her so far. Despite initially having no dreams of becoming a choreographer, she has cemented herself among the greats: she danced in Beyoncé’s 2008 Single Ladies video, has choreographed for Alicia Keys and Doja Cat, and worked as associate choreographer for the film adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights.
The new production of Fangirls is set in the present day and in the eight years since Blake first started working on it, fandom has continued to morph. Blake, however, is more interested in how fandom has advanced in the last three decades. “When I was five, I just expected my mum to invite the Spice Girls to my birthday party, because they were my friends,” she says. Now, social media gives teenagers an additional key into celebrities’ lives: “There is a direct line to them – how does that shape the idea of them potentially interacting with you?”
Blake acknowledges the negatives of the obsessive nature of fandom – “The show really does question where the boundaries are,” she says – and she is clearly fascinated by the psychology behind it. In 2019 she gave a Ted talk about it and she believes passionately that the creative work of fans deserves a place in the cultural canon. She gushes about the recent film The Idea of You, which is based on Harry Styles fan fiction and features a relationship between a boyband member and the mother of one of their fans: “I recommend it – even if it’s just for Anne Hathaway’s hair,” she laughs. “It just proves there are so many more dimensions to fangirls. Too often they’ve been derided as teenage girls just screaming.”
So, how does she hope young women feel when they come to see her show? “It would be too easy to make a show that purely vindicates them – it definitely pokes fun at them, too,” she says. But ultimately, Blake wants them to be celebrated. “I want it to be like an adrenaline rush and like that sinking feeling of a first crush at 14.”
Fangirls is at the Lyric Hammersmith, London, 13 July to 24 August.
