A fiercely honest, darkly funny exploration of women's health, confronting the devastating consequences of living with a condition that, for too long, has gone unheard...
What happens when your own body becomes something you can neither control nor entirely understand? And perhaps more painfully, what happens when nobody believes you?
Tayla Kenyon's Tell Me Where It Hurts is a tender and honest unsettling exploration of Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD), a debilitating condition that turns the menstrual cycle into something far more destructive.
Award-winning theatre company Teepee Productions introduces us to Chrissy (Stephanie Booth), a drama teacher desperately trying to hold together the fragments of her life. Between staging a school production, supporting her troubled student Annie (Tayla Kenyon) and navigating a relationship with Nathan (James Schofield), whose hopes of fatherhood clash with her own uncertainties, Chrissy is fighting a battle largely invisible to everyone around her.
Booth brings a vulnerability to Chrissy, a woman capable of nurturing and understanding others, yet struggling to extend that same compassion towards herself. Her experiences expose the exhausting reality of having to repeatedly justify your own suffering, particularly when the symptoms cannot be seen.
There is a wonderful warmth and sharp, unexpected humour woven through their friendship
Kenyon cleverly intertwines Chrissy’s story with Annie’s, revealing how two women at very different stages of life can find themselves similarly dismissed, misunderstood and desperate to be heard. Yet within their shared struggles, an unlikely friendship offers something neither can easily find elsewhere: understanding.
And despite its difficult subject matter, this is far from an unrelenting parade of misery. There is a wonderful warmth and sharp, unexpected humour woven through their friendship, allowing moments of genuine tenderness to emerge from the darker realities of the story. It makes the characters all the more human, relatable and deserving of our attention.
Tell Me Where It Hurts refuses to present women’s health as an isolated medical issue, instead exposing how illness seeps into relationships, ambitions, identities and our most intimate decisions. It is as much a story about the need for human connection as it is about the loneliness of living with an invisible illness.
In a society where women's pain is still too readily minimised, Kenyon has created something urgently necessary: a play that doesn't simply ask us to witness suffering, but challenges us to question why so many women must fight to have it acknowledged.
Tell Me Where It Hurts played at Nottingham Playhouse on Thursday 15 October 2026.
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