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 1945–1951, Labour government and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 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 (wartime), 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." 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." 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.” 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."Touched webpage on www.nickhernbooks.co.ukSources
*''Touched'' by Stephen Lowe, Methuen Publishing, Methuen 1981 *''Touched'' by Stephen Lowe, Nick Hern Books 2006References
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