Touched (play)

Touched is a play by English playwright Stephen Lowe.

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.

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. The rehearsed reading of Touched took place on 22 February 2006, with Anne-Marie Duff as Sandra.Nick Hern Books published a new edition of the play to coincide with this production, with a new afterword by Lowe.

The play has been revived many times by regional theatres in England, including Derby Playhouse and Salisbury Playhouse, and colleges, including RADA and Canterbury College in February 2011. In February 2017, Nottingham Playhouse celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the play with a new production starring Vicky McClure as Sandra. 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.

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."

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