Touch

Dee is 33. She lives in an unglamorous bedsit in London, far from her home in the Welsh valleys. She has a temp job in marketing. She goes to yoga classes but can’t do yoga. She drinks a lot of red wine. She pisses in the shower because the toilet is broken.

Vicky Jones’ new comedy Touch – a product of DryWrite, the company behind Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s fringe-show-cum-sitcom Fleabag – presents scenes from Dee’s life. More specifically, it presents us with a series of conversations between Dee and a succession of friends, boyfriends, lovers and one-night-stands, from which Jones composes an intelligent, probing study of sexuality, desire and empowerment that ultimately asks the question: is it okay not to be in control?

Amy Morgan is superb as Dee, blithely funny and utterly likeable, convincingly hiding her increasingly fraught emotions behind a veil of drink, drugs and desperately disappointing lovers. She is well supported by James Marlowe as a straight-laced control freak, Edward Bluemel as a cocksure, teenage ‘bit of Jack Wills’, James Clyde as an effete older man, Matthew Aubrey as a indecipherably Welsh old flame and Naana Agyei-Ampadu as a girl friend (and girlfriend) struggling with her own problems.

Jones herself directs with unshowy, naturalistic verve on Ultz’s rotating temple of unwashed duvets, empty Pringles tubes and wine-stained glasses. Oh, and the whole thing’s funny too. Sitcom in tone, sexual in content – and properly funny.