Toast - Nottingham Theatre Royal, 5 April 2016

C: "There's an offer on this play next week, just £15 per ticket"

M: "You won't come to see 'Noises Off', which we know is funny, yet you want to see some random play just because there's an offer on?!"

C: "Well there's nobody famous in that. This one has Matthew Kelly."

M (not swayed by the dubious merit of Matthew Kelly but in the spirit of being open-minded): "OK then".

C, 10 minutes later: "I can see why they were cheap - hardly any seats have gone".

...

The best thing I can say about Toast is that it isn't very long. Perhaps an hour before the interval and the second half couldn't have been more than 35 minutes.

The Nottingham Post's reviewer wrote "it's relatively hard work a lot of the time, but with a less than commensurate payback", which in my book was tantamount to (undeserved) glowing praise.

The second best thing was that the plot was easy to follow. But bear in mind that we didn't know the play had ended until the cast came on for a bow.

The thing did manage to evoke the atmosphere in a break room in a commercial bakery in the 1970s with the swearing, sexism, and banter you'd expect from an all-male workforce. But I don't want to pay £15 to witness that! In fact one could argue that this was the worst £30 we ever spent on entertainment since the last awful play I was persuaded to go to. Will I never learn?!

NB If you hated this play why not try hating Forever Young, I was a Rat, A Winter's Tale, Peter Pan Goes Wrong, and the aptly named Joking Apart.