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.
Fan/Girl (8/1/24-8/26/24)
Catafalque (8/1/24-8/11/24)
Summerhall is at Summerhall (Demonstration Room), Summerhall Place, Edinburgh, EH9 1PL, Edinburgh.
Double Drop (8/3/22-8/28/22)