By YEP Marketer Jessica Martin

“I didn’t want to cry. Not in front of people, it’s embarrassing. But sometimes you can’t help it.”  A defying statement from one of the five hurting, passion-filled young women in the Everyman’s new play Our Town Needs a Nandos. Set in a North Wales school, writer Samantha O’Rourke tells the emotive stories of young women seeking safety, security, the opportunity to build friendships, and find love in their small town. 
 
O’Rourke, who wrote the play during her time as Young Everyman Playhouse (YEP) writer, drew on experience of working as a teaching assistant in schools along the North Wales coast. She praised the work of the cast and her fellow creatives believing their synergy and instinct for what is truthful elevated her written word to another level of performance. As a team, they produced a vibrant, wholly relatable celebration of teenage girls’ experience. 
 
Beth (Kalli Tant) dreams of bagel-filled, fluffy pyjama wearing adulthood while having to move into full-time work to help pay the rent. Ellie (Chloe Hughes), on report for bad behaviour, has love for everyone but herself. Rachel (Mali O’Donnell) navigates her sexuality, falling in love with Beth. Zahidah (Nadia Anim) displays an exemplary attitude, enjoying being in school after living on a refugee camp. Chloe (Jada Li-Warrican) adapts to life at a new school – constrained by a damaging past yet looking to the future. 

 
Many of the play’s most comedic yet affecting interactions take place in the drama studio. The five girls work on an exam piece, the topic ‘Our Town’. 

For O’Rourke, the setting of a drama lesson was an effective way into the idea she wanted to explore – the importance of seeing yourself in stories.  
She said: “Despite a lacking curriculum, drama is usually dominated by girls in that more girls take it. Drama is a time where they’re getting to be creative and imaginative, dictate, narrate, be weird and be funny.” 

Kirsten Peters Roebuck, the play’s producer, says O’Rourke’s writing “represents young people’s voices really well, with real authenticity and style.”  
It is this honesty that leads Roebuck to draw comparisons with the work of Taylor Swift – owing the singer-songwriters success to granting the (rarely given) importance, weight and value to young women’s emotions.  
Roebuck said:  “Most of the complex internal narratives and depth of emotion we get in media is rarely attributed to teenage girls. It’s really challenging being a woman in the world and it’s more challenging when you’re becoming one.”  
“Our Town literally puts in the spotlight five young women with really different experiences. Seeing their rich inner lives is special and unique.” 
 
Chloe Hughes, a YEP Actor graduate, plays Ellie. Ellie is a boisterous year 11 from Liverpool, one of many students from cities in the North West, managing a challenging school and home life while finding comfort in unexpected friendship.  
The decision to look at homegrown talent in YEP demonstrates an appetite to get scouse women voices on the stage and have their stories heard.   Hughes said:  “When I go the theatre, I feel so much more at home if I see people like myself – young girls, working-class girls, people with a regional accent.” 
“I’ve got a thirteen-year-old sister and in each of the characters I see bits of her. She will be like wow these girls have got the problems that I’ve got and that opens up the conversation on the stuff they don’t talk about as much.”  

Along with three actors from Liverpool, the cast also included actors from Wales and Birmingham. Although the characters are all young women on life’s journey of development with embryonic aspirations, they too have a specific set of experiences, sense of humour and identity. Our Town Needs a Nandos says it’s okay not to be what people expect of you. And it’s okay not to conform to cultural and societal “norms”. 
 
Ameera Conrad, director, said:  “This is for young women and older women who have ever felt like they’ve not been appreciated, or that they’ve not had a chance to be who they wanted to be.”  
“I hope people think about how we treat girls in the world and what we force upon them. Trying to take away the stigma of being queer or not thin or not white. Not wanting to put women in a box and tell them to be a certain way.”

Our Town Needs a Nandos was embraced by both critics and audience members. 
 
The Liverpool Echo said: “the play stirs up all those familiar feelings of youthful tension, worry and uncertainty, while hitting me with a delightful dose of nostalgia.” Arts City Liverpool commented: “O’Rourke has put strong young female voices, with all their hopes and dreams, firmly centre stage in a production which is full of energy and imagination.” 
 “Powerful theatre that puts young women centre-stage, life-affirming to see the mundane and the melodramatic cheek-by-jowl” one audience member tweeted. Another added: “Every parent should take their sons and daughters to see and learn.”
 
O’Rourke puts her success down to the YEP’s Writers programme.  
She said:  “When I landed at the Everyman on the Young Writers it was such a relief to be somewhere I felt people got me a bit.”  
“YEP offered me a community of peers, the chance to write for actors, see a load of theatre and work with the most supportive literary department who really believed in me, it was properly life changing.”