Promiscuous, pie-eyed and proud of it
Theatre Touch Soho Theatre
Meet Dee. She’s 33, has recently moved to London from Swansea for maternity cover, avidly pursues experimental sexual encounters, drinks a lot of bad wine and lives in a mouse-infested flat the size of a downstairs lavatory. Her own toilet, which is close to the fridge, doesn’t work, so she urinates in the shower. She’s quite happy with the mess. It’s everyone else in her life who isn’t.
An eye-smartingly funny 90 minutes, Touch is the creation of Vicky Jones, who has a professional relationship with star of the moment Phoebe Waller-bridge. It was their theatre company Drywrite that birthed Waller-bridge’s phenomenally successful Fleabag – as with Touch, it was first seen on stage at the Soho theatre, when it was performed as a monologue, before subsequently turning into a BBC show that was one of the big TV hits of 2016 and is due to return to the small screen for a second series next year.
Played by Mr Selfridge’s Amy Morgan, Touch’s Dee shares much DNA with Fleabag’s eponymous heroine: both are modern and boozy women defined by their refusal to police their sexuality. In a mark of this comedy’s effervescent intelligence, Jones explores how problematic this is for everyone else. Despite the fact Dee is actually pretty well balanced and certainly always in control of her sexual relationships, which include lesbian one-night stands, a reunion with a former boyfriend and an encounter with a male dominatrix, her lovers variously subscribe to the modern sacred cow that a sexually expressive, single woman in her 30s must, by definition, be in some sort of crisis.
Morgan gives a captivating performance here, beginning with a hilarious drunken strip routine and delivering acid putdowns with a deliciously breezy, compulsive honesty. She fuzzily wonders whether her fascination with spanking might undermine her feminism but the question Jones cleverly asks is why Dee’s sexual curiosity needs to mean anything at all. So where other sexually loud female characters come with a tortured contextual backstory or present their haphazard lifestyle as a by-product of their failure to have settled down, Dee is simply interested in different sorts of sex. Yep, she’s a bit lonely, but so far none of the men she has met come anywhere near the grade, so…
Touch is not as subversive or as fully fledged as Fleabag: you don’t sense it has the legs to make a TV series, for instance. But Jones proves herself a comic writer of fierce talent, and her production is superbly cast, too. Totally recommended.