Touched

Britain didn’t collapse overnight—it just slowly came apart. Jobs disappeared, trust faded, and people stopped looking each other in the eye. Then the Urban Regeneration Programme arrived. Not a government. Not a revolution. Just a system that slipped quietly into people’s lives and called it order.

Some welcome it. Some fear it. Most are just trying to survive it.

K.C. has a past no one bothers to understand, so they call her unstable. Dangerous. “Touched.” But she still sees things worth holding onto—things other people gave up on.

Thomas stopped feeling years ago. Grief hollowed him out, and now he moves through life unnoticed—until K.C. notices him.

Jessica, his daughter, is sharp and ambitious. She thinks emotions are a weakness she can’t afford.

Mason believes in the Programme. Rules are safe. Rules keep the dark away.

Marly says she wants a new life, but what she really wants is to feel something real before she goes numb for good.

In a world built to keep everyone apart, they find something rare—connection. Not love. Not friendship. Just the quiet ache of being changed by another person.

The Programme claims it can fix society. But to fix something, you have to strip it down—remove the messy, human parts first: fear, pain, hope, longing. The need for one another. But if we lose those things, what’s left of us?

Touched is about people who should have stayed strangers but didn’t—and the cost of feeling in a world that tells you not to.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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Host or Publisher Barbican Theatre