Touched... Like a Virgin

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From virginal teenage yearning through explosive sexual self-realisation to radical reinvention, Madge can offer a soundtrack for life. Olivia Lee's fetching play about one woman's obsession with Madonna and her rocky journey into her thirtysomethings is warm, catchy and effervescently performed.

Part of the Funny Women Pop Up Fringe, Touched... Like a Virgin skips back and forth through the life of Lesley, a smart, sparky woman who bounced from a working class background to a high flying career via a degree in Medieval History at Oxford. She doesn't waste time talking about the House of Plantagenets, though, and she hasn't dropped her thick Manchester accent - instead she talks vividly and yearningly of years of disappointing sexual encounters and a sense of her life slipping away from her as her less privileged peers settle down and populate.

There are some zinging one-liners and real empathy in Lewis's script. There are also some surprisingly belting live musical interludes. Watching performer Olivia Lee transfer from gawky adolescent to hair-tossing Material Girl isn't the Hen Party-pleasing jukebox show you might anticipate, but something far more humane and considered. There are some scattered character inconsistencies, and the presentation would benefit from tighter pacing from director James Phillips, but there's also a fascinating if underdeveloped tracing of Madge's links to third-wave feminism.

Madonna was the key to understanding the new boundaries of sisterhood and self-expression for a huge number of women, and Lewis's play is a convincing biography of one of them.