Review: Touched (Nottingham Playhouse)

Matt Aston’s production of Touched by Stephen Lowe marks 40 years since its first performance at Nottingham Playhouse and, according to the programme, is "the first professional production to have authentic Nottingham voices at its core." For an outsider, confronted by one of England’s less familiar accents, it makes establishing the domestic situation at the start more difficult, but all becomes clear as the relationships reveal themselves and the drama and the humour increase.

Touched is set between VE Day and VJ Day in 1945. Broadcasts about events in the war (most strikingly, Richard Dimbleby’s famous Belsen report) punctuate the family dramas and the growing excitement (of some characters, at least) at the election victory of Attlee’s Labour Party.

Lowe’s intention to present an image of working-class Nottingham life at the end of the war shows in some one-off scenes that establish the rhythms and routines of life, the best of them when Harry the chef, a soft-hearted political firebrand (persuasively played by Ian Kirkby), demonstrates his ways of getting back at the bosses to his fellow-workers Sandra and Mary.

However, the heart of the play lies with a group of working-class women, rather well-dressed in this production, though their terrace houses are suitably cramped in Jamie Vartan’s ingenious designs. Husbands are away at war, Sandra’s child has been killed in the black-out, Betty dreams of getting a young man after the war nipped a potential romance in the bud.

Of the three sisters central to the drama, Sandra’s story ultimately becomes the main motor of the plot. Outwardly composed, stubborn and self-willed, she gradually reveals her traumas through fantasy and the risk of scandal. Vicky McClure is vital and expressive in the part, though the character’s inner life can be elusive. Betty’s is a more straightforward fantasy world and Chloe Harris finds the right brightly brittle tone for her.

Then there is Joan – and a splendidly vibrant (and often amusing) performance from Aisling Loftus. Whether taking on the foreman at work with threats of the new world coming under Labour or rejoicing uninhibitedly in the defeat of Germans and Japanese or taking matters into her own hands to sort sister Sandra’s problems, Loftus is totally convincing.

In a sturdy supporting cast the women’s parts make most impact, notably Esther Coles as Mary, the typical neighbour figure more subtly drawn than is often the case, and Elizabeth Rider (Mam), at her best as the stony-faced matriarch at a family conference – and whichever of the three little girls listed to play Pauline played her on opening night was terrific.

The major world events are neatly woven into the action, even seen as a cause of some of it, with a final bringing together that is certainly dramatic and visually striking, if perhaps a touch over-emphatic and didactic.

Touched runs at Nottingham Playhouse until 4 March.