“They will tell you that legal and illegal are the same as right and wrong. And I’ve told you that you only have to sit still for a moment and watch the pieces move to see what a lie that is.”
Please Do Not Touch is a compelling and quietly devastating new play that follows Mason, a socially conscious TikToker who spends his time exploring heritage houses and interrogating the stories that museums choose to tell — and the ones they leave out. He is drawn to the overlooked histories behind familiar objects, determined to reveal the legacies of empire, ownership and erasure that still shape public spaces today.
But when an encounter involving a Somali Afro comb leads to a moment of bias and misunderstanding, Mason is suddenly thrust into a Young Offender Institution. What begins as a curiosity about history becomes an intimate, first-hand confrontation with a justice system that is anything but just. Inside an environment defined by silence, surveillance and control, Mason must decide how to hold on to his truth — and whether his voice can survive when everything around him is designed to mute it.
Through its 65 tense and beautifully crafted minutes, the play unravels questions about colonial legacy, the politics of display, and the emotional power of objects. It explores how cultural institutions shape narratives of belonging, and how everyday artefacts can carry centuries of harm, pride, resilience or memory. Mason’s journey reveals what happens when the histories we critique from the outside suddenly become entangled with our own lived experience.
Written by former Birmingham Poet Laureate Casey Bailey, and directed by award-winning theatre-maker Gail Babb, Please Do Not Touch blends storytelling, urgency and poetic clarity into a performance that is both deeply personal and undeniably political. The production is created by China Plate and Belgrade Theatre, presented in association with Birmingham Hippodrome, and is touring leading studio theatres across the UK.
More Bath Listings MORE
Swing Into Christmas
Celebrate the festive season in style with the sensational Down for the Count Swing Orchestra, as they head…
David Olusoga
Multi-Award-Winning producer, presenter, historian and professor, David Olusoga examines some of history’s missing chapters to uncover how and…
Please Do Not Touch
“They will tell you that legal and illegal are the same as right and wrong. And I’ve told…