What you are trying to do is use a symbolic reference. This is almost always a bad idea. You should use a dispatch table or even a series of if/elsif statements. You could do it using eval but that is dangerous unless you know what you are doing. You can do it like this provided you turn off strict:

no strict 'refs';
my $var1 = 'foo';
&$var1('Roghue, symbolic refs are bad practice');
sub foo { print "Hello $_[0]\n" }
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