If there is one thing Our Town Needs a Nando’s understands, it is that there is very little to do in a small Scottish town. Its solution? Peri-peri chicken.
Set in a high school, the play follows five girls attempting to complete a Drama assignment titled Our Town. It quickly becomes less a performance and more a public inquiry into why their town is spectacularly rubbish. There are no decent parks, the beaches are scattered with broken glass, and after 10pm the only cultural institution open is McDonald’s. Most importantly, there is no Nando’s.
These petty, painfully specific complaints are precisely what make the show so funny. Beneath every exaggeration lies the recognisable misery of growing up somewhere that appears to have been designed primarily for leaving.
The comedy is at its best when the girls are allowed to be completely ridiculous. A “Bond Girl” scene descends into a gloriously confused explanation of James Bond, while an excruciatingly earnest “Say No to Drugs” performance feels ripped straight from a doomed PSHE lesson. Add Dragon Soop cans and attempts to vape in the toilets without setting off the alarms, and the whole thing becomes painfully familiar.
The script has some genuinely excellent one-liners, too. “Why do we always have to say dicks? Why don’t we ever say vaginas?” lands first as classic teenage logic, but also pokes fun at the strange, gendered language we use as insults. That balance of silly, confrontational, and unexpectedly perceptive, is where the writing excels.
The cast capture the volatile chemistry of teenage friendship: affection expressed through insults, gossip conducted like state intelligence, and arguments capable of becoming nuclear within seconds.
At times, however, the play tries to carry too much. Queerness, race, alcohol, drugs, eating disorders, feminism, teen pregnancy, and domestic abuse all compete for space. Some of the material lands powerfully, particularly the treatment of harassment and the exhausting vigilance demanded of women. Elsewhere, the writing feels less assured. The character of Zahidah is given a real emotional force, but the character is too often made to carry the weight of the issues around her rather than being allowed the same messy, ridiculous humanity as everyone else.
Still, Our Town Needs a Nando’s is funniest and most moving when it simply lets five teenagers be five teenagers. It is chaotic, brutally funny, and full of moments that will feel painfully familiar to anyone who has survived a Scottish high school.
And yes, the town really does need a Nando’s.
Our Town Needs a Nando’s is running until 15 August at theSpace on the Mile.
Buy tickets here
Image provided by theSpace to the Student for press use
