Girls Like That and other plays for teenagers (NHB Modern Plays)

This collection features four urgent and explosive plays by award-winning playwright Evan Placey, each tackling issues facing young people today. They provide ideal material for teenagers to read, study and perform.

Girls Like That explores the pressures caused by technology when a schoolgirl's naked photograph goes viral. Commissioned in 2013 by Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Theatre Royal Plymouth and West Yorkshire Playhouse, it has subsequently been performed by school and youth-theatre groups across the UK, at the Unicorn Theatre, London, and in the Houses of Parliament. It won the Writers' Guild Award for Best Play for Young Audiences.

Banana Boys, published here for the first time, is about the challenges of being on the school football team - and secretly gay. It was commissioned and produced by Hampstead Theatre's heat&light company in 2010.

In Holloway Jones, Holloway dreams of being a world-class BMXer, but she is held back by the tough reality of a parent in prison. Also making its debut in print here, the play was commissioned by Synergy Theatre Project, toured schools and the Unicorn Theatre in 2011, and won the 2012 Brian Way Award for Best Play for Young People.

Finally, Pronoun is a love story about two childhood sweethearts dealing with the fact that one of them, Isabella, has now become a boy. As one of the plays in the 2014 National Theatre Connections Festival it proved enormously popular with youth theatres and college companies.

'Maybe change starts with plays like this' Lyn Gardner, Guardian, on Girls Like That.

'I don't censor the world for young people'. Read an extract from Evan Placey's introduction to this volume, published in The Guardian.

Auteur

Evan Placey is a Canadian-British playwright who grew up in Toronto and now lives in London, England. His plays include Consensual (National Youth Theatre, 2015 West End season); Girls Like That (commissioned by Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Theatre Royal Plymouth and West Yorkshire Playhouse); Mother of Him (Courtyard Theatre; winner of the King's Cross Award for New Writing, RBC National Playwriting Competition, Canada, and the Samuel French Canadian Play Contest); Banana Boys (Hampstead Theatre); Suicide(s) in Vegas (Canadian tour; Centaur Theatre Award nomination); Scarberia (Forward Theatre Project/York Theatre Royal); How Was It For You? (Unicorn Theatre); Holloway Jones (Synergy Theatre Project/schools tour/Unicorn Theatre; winner of the Brian Way Award 2012 for Best Play for Young People; Writers' Guild Award nomination) and Pronoun (National Theatre Connections). Work for radio includes Mother of Him (BBC Radio 3/Little Brother Productions). Evan is a Creative Fellow and Lecturer at the University of Southampton, and also teaches playwriting to young people for various theatres, and also in prisons.