Touched (play)

Last updated

Touched is a play by English playwright Stephen Lowe.

Contents

The play opened at the Nottingham Playhouse on 9 June 1977, directed by Richard Eyre. It was revived at the Royal Court in January 1981, in a new production by William Gaskill. Both productions starred Marjorie Yates as Sandra. The play was joint winner of the George Devine Award in 1977. [1]

In February 2006, it was one of the fifty plays chosen by the Royal Court to represent the fifty-year history of the English Stage Company with readings in the Theatre Upstairs - Look Back: 50 readings, 50 writers, 50 plays. [2] The rehearsed reading of Touched took place on 22 February 2006, with Anne-Marie Duff as Sandra. [3] Nick Hern Books published a new edition of the play to coincide with this production, with a new afterword by Lowe. [4]

The play has been revived many times by regional theatres in England, including Derby Playhouse and Salisbury Playhouse, [5] and colleges, including RADA and Canterbury College in February 2011. [6] In February 2017, Nottingham Playhouse celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the play with a new production starring Vicky McClure as Sandra. [7] Five of the cast were graduates of the Central Junior Television Workshop in Nottingham: Vicky McClure, Aisling Loftus, Chloe Harris, Luke Gell and George Boden. [8]

Plot and themes

The play is set in 1945 during the hundred days between VE Day in May 1945 and VJ Day in August 1945, a period which also included the election of the first ever Labour government and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The play focuses on a group of women in a working-class suburb of Nottingham, especially Sandra and her sisters, Joan and Betty. Sandra has lost a child: not killed by an enemy bomb, but by a car in the blackout. Now, with peace coming, she is full of hope for a different kind of future. She says, "The world's changing. It's not going to go back to the way it was." [9]

Lowe was inspired to write the play by his mother: "I grew up on the usual pulp of heroic war films and comics... While therefore I gained a fairly graphic picture of the life of a soldier, it occurred to me while talking to my mother that I had hardly any picture of those who stayed at home - those whose battles had been fought in the landscape I had grown up in. I knew nothing, really, about the sacrifices and suffering of the women who only a few years later were to pick me up and put me down, and place pennies in my hand. Pennies I had never thought to return." [10]

As critic Lyn Gardner says, the play reflects “both the social mores of the time and the inner emotional lives of these down-to-earth women. It understands their tribal loyalties and their stern sense of working-class morality, forbidding fraternisation with the Italian POWs that might put one of their number beyond the pale.” [11] Time Out said of the play, "Touched is truly identified with working people and a radical vision, unlike many contemporary plays for which the same claim is made." [12]

Sources

Related Research Articles

Edward Bond English dramatist and theatre director

Edward Bond is an English playwright, theatre director, poet, theorist and screenwriter. He is the author of some fifty plays, among them Saved (1965), the production of which was instrumental in the abolition of theatre censorship in the UK. Other well-received works include Narrow Road to the Deep North (1968), Lear (1971), The Sea (1973), The Fool (1975), Restoration (1981), and the War trilogy (1985). Bond is broadly considered among the major living dramatists but he has always been and remains highly controversial because of the violence shown in his plays, the radicalism of his statements about modern theatre and society, and his theories on drama.

Nottingham Playhouse

Nottingham Playhouse is a theatre in Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, England. It was first established as a repertory theatre in 1948 when it operated from a former cinema in Goldsmith Street. Directors during this period included Val May and Frank Dunlop. The current building opened in 1963.

Simon Stephens is an English playwright and Professor of Scriptwriting at Manchester Metropolitan University. Having taught on the Young Writers' Programme at the Royal Court Theatre for many years, he is now an Artistic Associate at the Lyric Hammersmith. He is the inaugural Associate Playwright of Steep Theatre Company, Chicago, where four of his plays, Harper Regan,Motortown, Wastwater, and Birdland had their U.S. premieres. His writing is widely performed throughout Europe and, along with Dennis Kelly and Martin Crimp, he is one of the most performed English-language writers in Germany.

Jack Shepherd is an English actor, playwright, theatre director, saxophone player and jazz pianist. He is known for his television roles, most notably the title role in Trevor Griffiths' series about a young Labour MP Bill Brand (1976), and the detective drama Wycliffe (1993–1998). His film appearances include All Neat in Black Stockings (1969), Wonderland (1999) and The Golden Compass (2007). He won the 1983 Olivier Award for Best Actor in a New Play for the original production of Glengarry Glen Ross.

Stephen Lowe is an English playwright and director.

<i>The Madness of George III</i>

The Madness of George III is a 1991 play by Alan Bennett. It is a fictionalised biographical study of the latter half of the reign of George III of the United Kingdom, his battle with mental illness, and the inability of his court to handle his condition. It was adapted for film in 1994 as The Madness of King George.

Maxwell Robert Guthrie Stewart "Max" Stafford-Clark is a British theatre director.

Peter Gill is a Welsh theatre director, playwright, and actor. He was born in Cardiff to George John and Margaret Mary Gill, and educated at St Illtyd's College, Cardiff.

Vicky McClure British actress

Victoria Lee McClure is an English actress, model and presenter. She is known for her roles as Detective Inspector Kate Fleming in the BBC series Line of Duty (2012–present) and Lol Jenkins in Shane Meadows' film This Is England (2006) and its Channel 4 sequel mini-series This is England '86 (2010), This Is England '88 (2011), and This Is England '90 (2015). Before This is England, she appeared in another of Meadows' films, A Room for Romeo Brass (1999), where she played Ladine. She won the RTS Award and British Academy Television Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Lol in This is England '86 in 2011.

William Dudley is a British theatre designer.

Salisbury Playhouse

Salisbury Playhouse is a theatre in the English city of Salisbury, Wiltshire. It was built in 1976 and comprises the 517-seat Main House and the 149-seat Salberg, a rehearsal room and a community & education space. It is part of Arts Council England's National Portfolio of Organisations, and also receives regular funding from Wiltshire Council and Salisbury City Council.

<i>East</i> (play) 1975 play by Steven Berkoff

East is a 1975 verse play by Steven Berkoff, dealing with growing up and rites of passage in London's rough East End.

Robert Holman was a British dramatist whose work has been produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and the Royal Court Theatre, as well as in the West End and elsewhere, since the 1970s. He was a resident dramatist at both the RSC and the National Theatre.

Aisling Loftus is a British actress, best known for portraying Agnes Towler on the ITV series Mr Selfridge and Sonya Rostova on the BBC historical drama series War & Peace.

<i>Ghost Stories</i> (play)

Ghost Stories is a one-act horror play written by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman.

Posh is a play by the British playwright Laura Wade. It was first staged at the Royal Court Theatre in April 2010. The play concerns an Oxford University dining club called "The Riot Club", a fictionalised version of the Bullingdon Club. The first production, premiering shortly before the 2010 United Kingdom general election, received favourable reviews.

Jessica Swale is a British playwright, theatre director and screenwriter. Her first play, Blue Stockings, premiered at Shakespeare's Globe in 2013. It is widely performed by UK amateur companies and is also studied on the Drama GCSE syllabus. In 2016 her play Nell Gwynn won the Olivier Award for Best New Comedy, after it transferred from the Globe to the West End, starring Gemma Arterton as the eponymous heroine.

Caryl Lesley Churchill is a British playwright known for dramatising the abuses of power, for her use of non-naturalistic techniques, and for her exploration of sexual politics and feminist themes. Celebrated for works such as Cloud 9 (1979), Top Girls (1982), Serious Money (1987), Blue Heart (1997), Far Away (2000), and A Number (2002), she has been described as "one of Britain's greatest poets and innovators for the contemporary stage". In a 2011 dramatists' poll by The Village Voice, five out of the 20 polled writers listed Churchill as the greatest living playwright.

Gbolahan Obisesan is a British Nigerian writer and director. He is the Artistic Director at Brixton House theatre. He has served as a Genesis Fellow and Associate Director at the Young Vic.

Jonah and Otto is a play by Robert Holman that was first performed in 2008 and published in the same year.

References

  1. ↑ Touched by Stephen Lowe, Methuen 1981, p 5.
  2. ↑ Look Back: 50 readings, 50 writers, 50 plays. Royal Court website, archived page, 2006.
  3. ↑ Latest News, Stephen Lowe's website.
  4. ↑ Touched by Stephen Lowe. London, Nick Hern Books, 2006.
  5. ↑ Touched, review by Lyn Gardner of 2008 revival at Salisbury Playhouse, The Guardian, 8 April 2008.
  6. ↑ "Drama Production - Touched — Canterbury College, Kent, UK". www.cant-col.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 27 January 2011.
  7. ↑ [ dead link ]
  8. ↑ "Review: Stephen Lowe's Touched at Nottingham Playhouse". 21 February 2017.
  9. ↑ Touched by Stephen Lowe - Methuen 1981, p29.
  10. ↑ Author's Note in Touched by Stephen Lowe, Methuen 1981, p2.
  11. ↑ Lyn Gardner, 2008 revival (see above, ref. 5)
  12. ↑ Touched webpage on www.nickhernbooks.co.uk
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.