Brighton Fringe 2026
Toast: Stories from the End of the World
Witwerks Theatre
Venue: Rotunda Theatre
Festival: Brighton Fringe
Low Down
“Toast is a darkly funny, intimate end-of-the-world play about connection, memory and the last drink on Earth. Adapted from Chance Dean’s original short play Toast, first performed during Witwerks Theatre’s sell-out run of Dramatic Draughts: Four Short Plays About the Pub, this new Fringe-length version artfully expands the story with just two actors playing a cast of vividly drawn characters from before the apocalypse.”
Review
Set during a dystopian future where “phone memory” is a term with tragically different connotations, Toast begins in a recently post apocalyptic pub. Some atmospheric sound helps to create the scene.
Mad Max costumes are well designed and very appropriate for the piece, if a little derivative.
But the end times set does the job very well, and I was particularly impressed with how quickly we were drawn into this apocalyptic world given the huge noise pollution coming from the bigger venue next door. But the cast quickly and intuitively adapted their volume and delivery to those constraints and, for me at least, sitting at the back, those annoyances were soon forgotten and I was transported.
Clarity of delivery therefore was pretty good, vocal wise, but there were places where things were just that little bit too laid back and I lost a few lines here and there.
Scavenging uncovers a luxury at the end of the world, but I’m not going to spoil what it is. Supposedly it becomes a very neat device for indulging our fears when all we have left is our fear. And at the same time, it’s a neat conceit in the writing that this becomes a trigger for a memory journey realised so well on stage by an alternation of lighting.
The need for the security of memory. This is perhaps the place we can flee into when everything else is uncertain and dangerous. A pub, another trigger for looking back, and we start to see parallels in a before and after reflection.
Toast is an intelligent study in uncertainty: we feel their tension in the need to keep moving, that some places are dangerous in the daytime and sometimes it is the night that can be our safest retreat. Like all good science fiction, it takes us into the future, confronts us with darker outcomes, but also throws light on our lives today.
Toast is a piece of writing realised in theatre that is boldly patient with itself.
Our characters are easily freaked out, highly strung, ready for the worst, but like all adaptive creatures, they are already quickly adjusting to the new reality and learning its rules.
This is a very ‘scripty’ piece, a bit redolent of Red Dwarf style payoffs and dialogue. But for me personally that works because it evokes the genre well, but I do think the voice of the writer over time will find even more uniqueness in their own voice.
This is sharp, offbeat comedy theatre, full of bathos. It offers a strong juxtaposition of past and menacing present.
Retrospective episodes and vignettes are well realised, neatly delineated by well drawn lighting. Deeper lurid shades for the apocalyptic present, paler for those scenes of memory, almost black and white.
Toast is a short play at ease with itself. It will strengthen with further work on deciding whether this is to be melodramatic or naturalistic or deliberately a mix of both. My humble view is that it should intentionally capture the unhinged nature of the sci-fi situation where we do not know whether to be over the top or hide under the radar.
Some important questions are being posed. What happens when the only things we truly long for in the present are those things lost in the past, wishing to throw light on our situation in a world where daylight is dangerous?
There’s a spirit of adventure in the staging and the script, ripe for another ten minutes. I felt it ended just that little bit too quickly.
I applaud the energy and spirit of Toast, the focus of the two strong actors and the offbeat, unfussy writing and look forward to seeing it again on its developmental journey.
