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Louise Roche has an inspirational story of her own. Sitting in the Milton Keynes Theatre watching a Shane Ritchie musical she thought "I could do this!" And she did!

Her first play Girls' Night subsequently enjoyed a hugely successful UK tour before opening in America. It’s just opened in Korea and will soon be on in New York!

Since then, she has written many other plays and through her own production company, Goodnights Entertainment, which she set up with husband Mark Randle, they have been seen all over the UK.

But now, she is putting her skills to even more use in the town where it all started. She and Mark have set up Entertainment MK, a community branch of ‘Goodnights’, with the aim of working with local people and help them tell stories of their own.

The girls in Pushchair Theatre with Louise

Tour

After talking to the teenage pregnancy advisor at Milton Keynes Council, Entertainment MK's first project is with a group of teenage mums who call themselves Pushchair Theatre. This week, they have embarked on a tour of local schools with a play called Mums and Prams, which it's hoped will make other young people think before embarking on a route from which there is no return.

For the past 12 weeks, Louise and Mark have been working with a group of mums who are involved with Connections, a support organisation based at the Christian Foundation in Wolverton. They are all under 20, and have children between the ages of about six months and three years.

Entertainment MK’s aim is to make theatre with people using their experiences and then helping them with the performance. So to this end, Louise has put together a play about teenage pregnancy written directly from the young women’s experiences, using their words from interviews that Louise has conducted.

“There have been about eight girls involved” explained Louise, “and I’ve literally just recorded their conversations which have been mindboggling at times, just so moving and surprising and sometimes disturbing - but very funny, they’ve got a great humour about them! So, I’ve used their actual experiences and words and put them into a form – a bit like The Vagina Monologues, but about teenage pregnancy instead.

“Now we’re training them to perform it and we’re going to take it around local secondary schools.”

Changes

Louise also revealed that it has been really interesting for both her and Mark watching the girls grow throughout the process.

“A few of them didn’t actually say anything for a couple of weeks” she said, “but they’ve grown in confidence.

“I think what’s been interesting for me - and I didn’t expect this - is that a few of them had never told their stories before. But once they had told their story to the group and I re-presented it in the form of a script, and then either they or somebody else read their story out, it just made them see it in a different way and you saw a change in them.

“There’s one girl in particular that I can think of who didn’t say anything for about four weeks or even really put her head up. Then she told her story and heard it back and she just seemed to physically stand taller, and certainly talked more and then got to the point where she was performing it in front of people. So we’ve seen dramatic changes in them, it’s been a great thing to do.”

Louise hopes that this initial tour of schools in Milton Keynes is just the start because, having impressed the Council, it is likely that the five girls in Pushchair Theatre will now perform in all secondary schools in the new city.

Power

She feels that the power in the piece comes from the fact that not only are true stories being relayed, but also the girls are only a little older than the youngsters that they will be performing to, and in some cases, the same age.

“It’s actually coming from real people who have had the real experience” she said, “it’s going to be a lot more profound than actors going in or hearing it from teachers. For these girls, this is their real story, so they know what they’re talking about.

“The other great thing that’s coming out of it is that these girls are growing in confidence” she continued.

“They are going out there and talking about something, which for a lot of them has not been a great experience. They all love their children and don’t want to NOT have them, but it’s been tough for them and they’re doing something positive with that experience.”

Emotional

For these girls, while it was emotional it has also been great for them socially as well. Chantelle had her daughter at 15 and revealed how it had helped HER.

“I’ve enjoyed myself a lot” she said, “because you don’t get to make a lot of friends really, when you’re a single mum. You’re just stuck at home doing nothing so this is getting us all out of the house and getting us together really. I want to carry on doing this, I don’t want to stop!”

Now the weeks of rehearsals are over and people are going to see the results of their hard work, the girls are united in what they hope the result will be. Nicole is 19 and had her son at 16. She explained what the aim was:

“To cut down the rate of teenage pregnancy” she said, “and let them know that it’s not a walk in the park. I think we’re in a good position to tell them because we’re young ourselves and we know what we’re talking about.”

Even though all these young mums love their kids – what they are saying in the play is that they were too young to go down this route. Becky had her daughter at 18 and gave me her take on what the play is saying.

“Like one of my lines in the script, I wouldn’t advise kids to have children young, because it’s very hard” she said.

“I do love my daughter and I wouldn’t change her for the world, but maybe doing it a little bit later on in life would have been a lot better.”

Graphic

Mums and Prams doesn’t shy away from telling the truth about both the mental and physical effects of having a baby and some of the medical details are particularly graphic and will make anyone who thinks its glamorous, think again.

But the piece also reveals that, while you may start out with a vision of a happy family unit, it’s just not realistic.

“The dads might not all stick around” explained Becky, “we’re all single parents. I think I know one or two people out of all the mums I know that are with boyfriends and the majority of them have got different boyfriends, so it’s not actually their child’s dad.

“A lot of teenagers who have babies now think it’s going to be fine and the dad’s going to stick around” she continued, “but it’s not like that. And that’s what we want to get across. We want them to understand it’s not easy, it’s hard, so just enjoy your life while you’ve got it [to yourself] because once you’ve got kids, it isn’t all down hill, but you’ve got restrictions, you cannot do half the stuff that you did before.”