Toast, Park Theatre - theatre review

Richard Bean’s debut play, which is revived here 15 years on from its premiere, is a small and vivid piece which feels like an ode to ordinariness
Henry Hitchings1 July 2015

Fifteen years on from its premiere, Richard Bean’s debut play gets its first London revival. It is a small and vivid piece, packed with Bean’s now familiar gallows humour.

In a Hull bread factory, six workers sustain themselves through their long shifts with a diet of banter, gossip and festering resentments. The arrival of temporary colleague Lance, played by John Wark as a mix of innocent nerd and creepy oddball, complicates their usual routines — and their work becomes more hazardous when a baking tin jams the main oven.

Suspicion at first falls on Matthew Kelly’s Nellie, a man of few words whose entire body seems to droop. A pitiful figure, he’s nonetheless capable of clownish absurdity, provoking laughter with a tiny gesture — the way he nurses one of his tired cheese sandwiches or makes fidgety efforts to conserve his modest supply of cigarettes.

He’s in retreat from the robust characters all around him: Finlay Robertson’s vain former trawlerman Dezzie, Steve Nicolson’s hard-bitten Blakey and Simon Greenall’s genial Cecil, who has found some strange techniques for taking the edge off his marital frustrations.

Performed with appealing simplicity, Toast feels like an ode to ordinariness — reminiscent of another writer with strong ties to Hull, Philip Larkin, though Bean evokes a grubbier, grittier world. Eleanor Rhode’s production captures both the grinding tediousness of shift work and the camaraderie that makes it bearable, while Max Pappenheim’s memorable sound design ensures that the unseen, temperamental oven is a substantial character in its own right.

Until September 21 (020 7870 6876, parktheatre.co.uk)

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