'One Man, Two Guvnors' (PBS)

 

The Public Broadcasting Service announced that it would broadcast Richard Bean’s Tony Award-winning comedy One Man, Two Guvnors as an episode of Great Performances.  I didn’t see One Man live when it was on Broadway, so I watched the Great Performances broadcast that night.  Since the New York theaters have been closed since March in response to the coronavirus pandemic, I decided to write up my impressions of the performance for Rick On Theater just as I would do for a live show. 

One Man, Two Guvnors had its television première on the evening of Friday, 6 November 2020, on Great Performances, the PBS anthology series dedicated to the performing arts.  The video, part of the program’s “Broadway’s Best,” is actually a live performance recorded in 2011 by London’s Royal National Theatre and released as National Theatre Live: One Man, Two Guvnors, produced by David Sabel and directed for the screen by Robin Lough. 

National Theatre Live is an initiative of the National Theatre which broadcasts performances of the theater company’s productions (and some from other theaters) live via satellite to cinemas and arts centers around the world.  (Except for the ensemble, who were cast in New York, and one featured role, the cast of the National Theatre video is the same as the opening-night Broadway cast.)

One Man is an English adaptation of The Servant of Two Masters, a 1745 Commedia dell’arte-style farce by the Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni (1707-93; see my ROT reports “The Servant of Two Masters (Shakespeare Theatre Company, 2012),” 9 July 2012, and “Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters (Piccolo Teatro di Milano, 2005),” 29 July 2012). 

Richard Bean (b, 1956) was born in East Hull, a port city on the Humber estuary in Yorkshire, near England’s east coast.  He studied social psychology at Loughborough University in Leicestershire (about 105 miles south of Hull), and then worked as an occupational psychologist. 

Bean worked in a bread plant for a year and a half after leaving school.  This was the setting for his second play, Toast (1999; see my report on ROT on 19 May 2016), which I saw as part of 59E59 Theaters’ Brits Off Broadway.  (There’s a bit of a biography of the playwright in that report.)

Between 1989 and 1994, Bean also worked as a stand-up comedian and went on to be one of the writers and performers of the BBC Radio show Control Group Six which was nominated for a Writers Guild Award.  (Control Group Six, a series with an experimental format that interspersed unrelated sketches in an unfolding storyline based on a dark-tinged, futuristic thriller, ran in two series in 1995 and 1997.)

One Man, Two Guvnors opened under the direction of Nicholas Hytner (Tonys for the 1994 Lincoln Center revival of Carousel and the 2006 Broadway début of The History Boys—which also featured James Corden, the lead in One Man) at the Royal National’s Lyttleton Theatre on 24 May 2011, closing on 19 September. 

It toured the United Kingdom for five weeks in September and October and then opened at the Adelphi Theatre in the West End on 21 November and ran until 25 February 2012 when it transferred to the Theatre Royal Haymarket on 2 March; the London production of One Man closed on 1 March 2014. 

The show won Best Play at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards for 2011 and was nominated for a 2012 Olivier Award: for Best New Play.  One Man went out on a second UK tour in 2012 and ’13 and an international tour in 2013.  Then it had a third UK tour in 2014 and ’15.

A Broadway mounting premièred at  the Music Box Theatre on 18 April 2012.  The limited engagement concluded on 2 September, a run of 159 regular performances, and received seven Tony nominations; Corden won a Tony Award for Best Actor In A Leading Role In A Play.  One Man was also nominated for and won three Drama Desk Awards: Outstanding Actor In A Play (Corden), Outstanding Featured Actor In A Play (Tom Edden), and Outstanding Music In A Play (Grant Olding). 

In addition to the National Theatre Live video (and now the PBS broadcast), Fox Searchlight Pictures and Damian Jones have signed on to produce a feature film adaptation of One Man, Two Guvnors.  Oli Refson is writing the screenplay.  Though no casting, including the lead role of Francis Henshall, has been announced, playwright Bean and stage director Hytner will serve as executive producers.  No release date has been announced.

According to a BBC News report, Bean had to change parts of the play for a U.S. audience before it opened in New York.  For instance, the author remarked that he had to rewrite all the cricket references because we Americans don’t understand them.  He indicated some other local jokes that he felt wouldn’t go over on this side of the Atlantic were also replaced.

“But Bean, a former stand-up comedian, promises that the changes won't be too drastic,” added reporter Tim Masters, who interviewed the playwright for the British Broadcasting Corporation.  “The reason that the play works,” explained Bean, ”is that it is end-of-the-pier British comedy and obviously we’re not going to destroy that.”  He was referring to the bawdy, old-fashioned style of broad comedy provided by British music halls, often located at the end of the pleasure piers in seaside resorts.

The PBS broadcast is the London edition of the play, so the British jokes, of course, hadn’t been excised.  There are indeed several jokes, some of them extended or recurring, that must have made more sense to the Brits in the house (who laughed uproariously at every one) than they did to me.

One example was Lloyd Boateng (Trevor Laird), Charlie’s friend from Jamaica’s repeated references to Parkhurst.  Lloyd says that was where he learned to be a chef (he owns a pub that “does food” and is catering the party that opens the play) and where he learned about “true love.”  Well, obviously it’s some place where those experiences wouldn’t be expected and it must be a place where it would be incongruous for them both to occur. 

I guessed correctly, but I had to look it up to be certain: the reference is to Her Majesty’s Prison Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight, once one of the toughest jails in the British Isles where many notable criminals were incarcerated.  A Brit would obviously know this without recourse to Wikipedia; it’s not as funny if you have to look it up later.

Playwright Richard Bean reset One Man in the British seaside resort town of Brighton in 1963.  The plot centers on an out-of-work musician named Francis Henshall (James Corden, currently the host of CBS’s Late Late Show), recently fired from his skiffle band, who becomes a bodyguard/minder for Roscoe Crabbe, a petty East End crook.  

Little does Francis know that Roscoe, supposedly in Brighton to collect £6,000 from his fiancée’s father, is actually dead and his twin sister, Rachel (Jemima Rooper), is now masquerading as her brother, killed by her boyfriend, Stanley Stubbers (Oliver Chris).  (Is everybody following this?) 

There’s a repeated joke about whether Roscoe and Rachel can be “identical twins” if they’re of different genders.  It’s a mark of the intelligence of many of the characters that they can’t comprehend this distinction.  (One character even discourses on the scientific difference between monozygotic twins and dizygotic twins.  Now there’s an apt topic for low comedy for ya.)

To complicate matters even more, when the perpetually ravenous Francis sees the chance for an extra meal ticket, he takes on a second job with Stanley, an upper class twit who’s hiding out from the police and waiting to be reunited with Rachel.  To prevent discovery, Francis must keep his “two guvnors” apart, an increasingly difficult predicament as the two are both staying in the same pub named The Cricketers Arms, resulting in farcical mayhem.

Roiling events still further is local mobster Charlie “the Duck” Clench (Fred Ridgeway), who had arranged the engagement of his daughter, Pauline (Claire Lams), to Roscoe despite her preference for over-the-top amateur actor Alan Dangle (Daniel Rigby).  (So, an over-the-top actor in an over-the-top farce.  How does Bean come up with this stuff?)

(By the way, I tried to find a British slang explanation for calling someone a “duck,” but I was unsuccessful.  The context seems to be that Charlie’s cheap—a skinflint and chiseler—and Lloyd says of him in one exchange, “Man!  They don’t call you ‘Charlie the Duck’ for nothing!  Tight man!”)

Even more complications are prompted by several letters, a very heavy trunk, a number of unlucky audience “volunteers,” an extremely elderly waiter named Alfie (Tom Edden), and Francis’s pursuit of his twin passions: food and drink, and Charlie’s “women’s-libber” bookkeeper, Dolly (Suzie Toase).

One Man got James Corden a Tony (2012’s Best Performance By An Actor In A Leading Role In A Play) and led to his gig as the host of The Late Late Show.  (I only watched the first show of TLLS and decided I didn’t like it—or Corden—so I haven’t followed it.)  I didn’t much care for the play—it was like a semi-literate Benny Hill sketch (i.e., not Monty Python!  Or even Fawlty Towers). 

I’ve blogged before on TV versions of plays—The Originalist, for one (see my report on ROT, 17 July 2017), before I saw it live—so this isn’t unprecedented.  I also actually like silliness—as ROTters may have noticed in my reaction to Something Rotten! (see my report, 14 May 2016), plus my report on A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (16 October 2014), which had me howling in my seat!—but I draw the line at that really low humor the Brits love, but which makes me cringe.

(“That real bottom-of-the-barrel English humor is an acquired taste, I think,” my friend Kirk Woodward said to me when I told him my thoughts on writing up the performance of One Man, “based mostly on the fact that Pat [Kirk’s late wife], a deep-dyed Anglophile, didn’t like it either.”  My sense of the British taste for “knickers humor” isn’t so much that it’s “acquired,” but that it’s something its fans never grew out of. 

(Why the land of Shakespeare, Milton, Shaw, and Eliot has such a love affair with that knickers stuff is a mystery to me.  They still do Punch ’n’ Judy shows and—have you ever seen a “panto”?  They’re a combo of juvenile and prurient.  I say it’s a case of national arrested development.  That’s just MHO, of course.)

One example of what I mean—Bean’s frequent not-so-subtle allusions to sex.  One of Charlie’s party guests is his lawyer, Harry Dangle.  He’s the father of Pauline’s fiancé, Alan.  His law firm is Dangle, Berry, and Bush.  In addition to the puerile references to a man’s groin and genitalia (I hope I don’t have to spell that out for you!), there’s the added frisson of “Dangle, Berry” sounding awfully close to ‘dingleberry.’  Enough said?

(It’s not as if One Man, Two Guvnors is an all-out, sex-obsessed knickers farce.  It’s not.  Chris and Rooper find themselves hobbling around near the end of the play with their pants down around their ankles—but the joke is more about watching them try to walk around the stage with their trouser down than seeing them in underwear.  Earlier, Chris does make an entrance shirtless—but what’s supposed to be funny there is that he’s wearing a rug both on his chest and his back!  Both bits are more silly than funny—but, again, that’s just me.)

I found Bean’s Commedia travesty self-indulgent and the script a pastiche of bits from crusty old British farces that reminded me mostly of the Carry On franchise of 1958-78 with its bawdy  music-hall humor—right down to the casual homophobia, racism, sexism, ageism, and xenophobia. 

Bean points his insult gun at a wide range of topics, including women (and men), actors, The Beatles (especially Ringo), lawyers, cops, boarding schools and boarding school alumni, gays (and lesbians), religion(s), and old people. 

At least in passing, the play pokes stereotypical fun at foreigners like Spaniards and Italians, and countries like Canada (boring) and Japan, but Australia, where everyone apparently loves opera, comes in for the most frequent jabs. 

By the way, the Aussie’s obsession with opera is a new one on me; I’d never heard that about them.  What’s more, the juxtaposition of Australia and opera doesn’t seem nearly funny enough to merit three mentions.  Must be a Brit thing.

The problem is that while Bean’s parodying dated and bigoted tropes, he’s also perpetuating them.  It’s a shame because at the time he was composing One Man, Europe in particular was embarking on a rapid descent into xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, and anti-refugee politics that soon caught on here as well.  We have just debarrassed ourselves of a president who based his appeal and many of his policies on those sorts of forces.

What the play celebrates (if that’s the right word) is stupidity and ignorance.  The frequent refrain from Pauline Clench is a confused “I don’t understand!” and after one such cry, Alan, her beloved, declaims, “This is why I love her.  She is pure, innocent, unsoiled by education, like a new bucket.” 

The idea of a woman so empty-headed it renders her irresistible is surely a conceit we don’t need to go back to.  (See what I mean about the Carry On flicks and Benny Hill humor?  In case I didn’t make myself clear: I’m not a fan of Benny Hill and his genre of imbecilic “comedy.”)  But Pauline’s not the only example of this gambit. 

Her father’s the one with the difficulty over identical and fraternal twins, and Francis, the title character, isn’t terribly swift upstairs, either.  (“You’re not exactly a Swiss watch, are you,” says Stanley, one of Francis’s guvnors, to him—though that product of a British public school isn’t terribly bright himself.)

I thought stupidity as a virtue went out with the Three Stooges (whom I admit, I could never stand, even as a little boy).

I have to say, despite my obvious distaste for the play—Goldoni ought to be spinning in his grave, along with Giorgio Strehler, the Italian director whose métier was classic Commedia farce, especially Servant of Two Masters—the stage work was quite good.  It doesn’t hurt that the British have always been good at physical comedy; we Yanks have only caught up some in the last couple of decades or so.

There was a lot of physical humor in One Man, just as there would be in a Commedia dell’arte performance—pratfalls, stunts, faces, mime, and more—and it was all handled very well.  Hytner and his physical comedy director, Cal McCrystal, put the actors through their paces.

One of the best-performed bits was a tumble Francis takes right at the top of the show.  When James Corden enters, he tosses peanuts in the air and catches them in his mouth.  On his last toss, he back into an armchair which topples over backwards, taking Corden with it.  After a second or two, up he pops, announcing, “I got it!” and sticking out his tongue with the peanut upon it.  (Obviously, the last bit of this gag only really works visually on camera.)

There’s a caveat here, though.  I felt that almost all the physical turns, which were contrived and stock (as they were in Commedia dell’arte as well, of course), were also gratuitous.  They barely connected to the plot—they were “set pieces,” routines that could have been dropped in almost anywhere, and in any farce irrespective of plot. 

The best bit of physical acting was performed by Tom Edden as Alfie the ancient waiter in The Cricketers Arms.  Alfie’s 87, a World War I vet, and has nearly every frailty you can imagine: he’s deaf, suffers from tremors, has a balance problem, wears a pacemaker—and it’s his first day on the job.

Edden’s made to look like a cross among Boris Karloff, Marty Feldman as Igor in Young Frankenstein, and Christopher Lloyd as Uncle Fester in The Addams Family.  He performs spectacular pratfalls as doors are slammed into his face and he goes from zero to 60 in nothing flat when his pacemaker is turned up to 9.  

He does an almost unbelievable tumble that goes from teetering in the edge of the top step with his back to a flight of stairs to almost falling on his face on the landing—and just as we think he’s going to recover, he swivels and falls headfirst down the stairs (out of our sight, of course).

But he ought to have won his Drama Desk Award  for one gag alone: his slow, jittery cross with an empty soup bowl with a spoon in it on top of a plate from the serving table at center stage to the door to the dining room at stage left—raising such a clinking, clattering racket that before he can reach the door, Francis grabs him, opens the door, and shoves Alfie into the room just to stop the noise.  Talk about your coup de théâtre!

All the actors are good at the direct address to the audience, which is used a great deal in One Man—the breaking of the fourth wall.  They all do it well, but Suzie Toase’s Dolly uses it best.  Her character’s a stock mid-20th-century farce figure, the man-hungry woman, but Bean imbues her with a kind of wisdom no other character in One Man possesses. 

Toase uses the direct address exchanges as little lessons she aims at the women in the audience (but which have significance to the men as well).  Her asides seem more part of her character than those of the others; theirs somehow seem like shifts in gear.

Corden, however, is the master of ad libs and interaction with the audience.  One Man has a lot of audience participation, including three spectators who are brought onto the stage.  He handles the ad libs with complete confidence, as if it’s all scripted and rehearsed—and as if it isn’t the most terrifying thing an actor can be asked to do.

I’ve had occasion to have to improvise with fellow actors on stage—when something goes amiss and we had to cover—and I can tell you that every time it happened, my heart was in my throat and every minute that passed until we got back on track creeped along at a 10 to 1 ratio: one minute of real time seemed like 10 minutes inside my head.  Having to improvise with a member of the audience is scarier still!

In one bit, Corden brings two young men up to help him move a heavy trunk,  He’d done a solo attempt to lift it to no avail.  In the banter, after setting up the gag, Corden asks the two men, “Have either of you two got your Equity card?” He’s referring to the membership card for the British actors’ union, formerly officially titled the British Actors’ Equity Association.  Of course, neither man was a union member, it was just banter and everyone chuckled.

But whenever I see a bit like that in a show, I always wonder what would happen if the spectator was a union member?  What would the actor do if the “volunteer” pulled out his Equity card as Corden asked?  What would he do?  What would the stage manager do?  It’s just a fantasy I have—but I wonder if it’s ever happened.

Not all the volunteers get off so easily as Jess and Corey.  Take Christine, whom Corden brings on stage at the end of the first act when he’s frantically serving dinner to his two guvnors, each in a different dining room off stage while he’s in the middle trying to wait on them and steal food for himself from their orders.

Poor Christine is pushed around the stage, at one point shoved under the serving table.   She’s soaked with water when a crèpe Suzette flames up out of control (intentionally), and then she’s sprayed with fire extinguisher foam.  Finally, she’s led off by a stage manager, soaking wet and covered in white foam.

She has to be a plant—no one could treat an actual spectator like that and not get sued or even arrested for assault.  Christine’s dress was probably ruined—at the very least it would cost a lot to clean it.  But if she’s an actress planted in the audience for this scene, she’s excellent at playing the surprised and unwitting civilian, and sounding like a non-professional when she speaks.  I have no idea.

I can say, it made me uncomfortable to watch this all unfold.  I certainly left the play for quite a while as this went on.  I’m not sure that’s a good outcome.

As you can probably tell from the Drama Desk Award for Music in a Play that One Man, Two Guvnors is a play with music.  (Yeah, I know—Duuh!)  Don’t mistake that with a musical, in which the songs and dialogue are integrated (hopefully) and the music helps move the plot along.  In One Man, the songs are interludes—they aren’t character- or plot-driven and they’re mostly sung by singers outside the narrative of the script.  (They are joined occasionally by actors from the play—but not characters.)

In this case, the singers and musicians are a pop band led by Grant Olding, who also wrote the music and lyrics.  (He won that Drama Desk Award.)  Since Francis Henshaw was a member of a skiffle band, The Crave, as Olding (or Bean) named this combo, is appropriately also a skiffle band. 

(I won’t give an elaborate definition of skiffle music, but it’s an old American folk tradition that was given a revival in the U.K. in the late 1950s and early ’60s.  Some of the instruments played by a skiffle band are homemade or improvised; Francis, for instance, had been a washboard player before he was fired.  The Beatles, some of you may know, began as a skiffle band, first known as the Quarrymen, in the late 1950s.)

The Craze is made up (in the video; it was changed in the Broadway mounting) of Olding on lead vocals, guitar, keyboards, accordion, and harmonica; Philip James on guitar, banjo, and back-up vocals; Richard Coughlan on double bass, electric bass, and back-up vocals; and Ben Brooker on percussion including washboard and spoons, drums, and back-up vocals. 

Except when they need more room on stage and the bass and drums move below the platform, stage right, the band plays “in one” in front of the closed front curtain.  Dressed in skinny mauve suits (let’s remember the year in which the play’s set—who remembers Carnaby Street?), with Olding wearing Buddy Holly glasses, The Crave stand behind mikes that rise from the stage and sing during scene changes.

The lyrics comment on, but don’t reiterate, the characters and, to a lesser degree, plot developments of the play.  They sort of capture the mood of the play at that moment.  I confess that to my musically un-learned ear, the tunes largely sound repetitive, serving mostly as time-fillers.

After the first number, the combo was joined in succeeding songs by Corden on a small xylophone (he seems quite adept) and then Martyn Ellis  (who plays the lawyer Harry Dangle) on uke and vocals.  Ellis actually does a solo until he’s joined by Daniel Rigby (Alan) accompanying him with body percussion (he slaps his chest with his open hands).

Claire Lams, Suzie Toase, and Jemima Rooper (Pauline, Dolly, and Rachel), in blond bouffant wigs and early ’60s crinoline dresses do an Andrews Sisters-/ McGuire Sisters-style number and finally, Oliver Chris (Stanley Stubbers) performs a solo horn-honking routine on a dozen small brass bulb horns mounted on a rack.

Because National Theatre Live: One Man, Two Guvnors was an international broadcast, reviews were published all over the world.  I’m going to try to sample a range of outlets, since all the reviewers saw the same performance, and we’ll see if there are any differences in regional or media-type coverage. 

(I’ll be particularly curious to see how Australian reviewers felt about One Man, considering how many times playwright Bean branded Down Under as a “terrible godforsaken place.”  A Sydney Morning Herald story reported that Bean turned down the application of an Australian theater company to produce One Man, Two Guvnors because of the jokes at the country’s expense.

(“If it’s Australian actors doing that material it’s not going to work,” explained Bean, “but if Australian audiences see English actors doing it, they’ll understand it and it will be fine.”)

Here’s a survey of selected reviews from around the world and across the country.  I’ve restricted myself to reviews of National Theatre Live: One Man, Two Guvnors rather than the live presentation at the Lyttleton.

In The Times of London, Clive Davis watched the streaming version of the NT Live performance.  When his companion began to lose interest in the production before the end of the first act, he confessed that “to be frank I could understand why.”  James Corden’s “insane energy is what carries the convoluted storyline,” Davis judged..

“Even so,” he wondered, “can’t you have too much of his popeyed rants and hyperactive clowning?  This is a comedy that starts with the dial turned up to ten and never looks back.”

The Times writer continued: “At nearly three hours including an interval, it’s also much too long,” adding, “The musical interludes could all be ditched.” 

Davis acknowledged, “I didn't particularly enjoy this production,” but he pondered: “Would I have laughed more if I had been sitting next to flesh-and-blood people rather than my cat?  I'm not sure I would.”

Also from London, The Arts Desk’s Aleks Sierz dubbed the play a “gloriously silly farce . . . starring the irrepressible and Tony-award winning James Corden.”  In the scene in which Francis tries to serve his two guvnors dinner at the same time while keeping them apart from one another, Sierz felt that “the show’s slapstick reaches a pitch of intensity that is both viscerally funny and mind-bogglingly imaginative, with great comic work by Tom Edden as Alfie.”

“The show’s typical edginess means that we are encouraged to laugh at this oldie’s disability,” pointed out the reviewer, “which is disturbing as well as hilarious.  As in most classical farce, pain is funny—and we giggle so as not to cry.”

Corden’s “boyish charm . . . makes his incompetence charming as well as ridiculous” and his “confident bonhomie is particularly evident in the audience participation sequences.”  Sierz also parcels out praise for Rigby’s Alan, Chris’s Stanley, Rooper’s Rachel, Lams’s Pauline, and Toase’s Dolly.

The review-writer proclaimed Hytner’s production “dazzlingly brilliant” and added kudos to associate director Cal McCrystal who staged the clowning “to magnificent effect,” making it “satirical, bawdy and crowd-pleasingly funny.”

Matt Roush, writing for TV Insider, an online newsletter published by NTVB Media (which also puts out TV Guide, among other publications), called One Man, Two Govnors a “side-splitting farce” upon watching the PBS broadcast, and proclaimed Corden “a slapstick virtuoso.”

“Running himself ragged as Francis, . . . Corden dominates the stage with his tireless physical and verbal comedy,” wrote Roush.  “Highbrow it’s not,” the reviewer admitted, “but just try to contain the belly laughs when he’s joined by the miraculous . . . Tom Ed[d]en as a doddering ancient waiter.”

Roush observed, “Though based on a play from the commedia dell’arte era, the rhythms are pure vaudeville, with corny jokes, hammy overacting and campy musical interludes.”

“[I]f you were to ask me . . . what were the two funniest performances I’ve seen over too many years of playgoing,” mused Steven Suskin on New York Stage Review, “I would have an instant answer.  One was given by Phil Silvers, at an underpopulated matinee of the 1972 revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”

“The other,” continued Suskin, “a 2011 performance which nine years and some 400 (?) shows later still sets me laughing as I type this, is that of James Corden in Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors.”  Suskin first saw the Bean farce in London, but relished the chance to see it again when it was live-streamed.  (He went on to see it twice more in New York.)

“I was pleased and somewhat surprised to find that nothing was lost in the [transfer to the screen],” expressed Suskin.  “You did not have that same thrill of live theater, which in the case of One Man included Corden pulling volunteers and watercress sandwiches out of the orchestra seats,” acknowledged the reviewer.  “But the broadcast worked just as well, with the closeups on screen amplifying the power of the physical humor and stoking the overall hilarity.”

Touting the April 2020 broadcast by the National Theatre over the Internet, Suskin advised “those of you with an interest in comedy might do well to watch One Man, Two Guvnors twice or thrice this week.  I mean, what good is sitting alone in your room. . . if you can spend the hours laughing?” 

The NYSR writer is obviously a Fan—with a capital F—of James Corden.  “I won’t even try, at this point, to describe Corden’s performance,” affirmed Suskin.  “He was all over the stage, all over the floor, juggling plates and characters and plotlines with such voraciousness and such relish that you (and the thousand other customers) gave up on decorum and laughed yourself past exhaustion to exhilaration.”

“James Corden might not be a vaccine for the coronavirus pandemic,” declared Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune, “but he . . . sure is therapeutic.”  He went on to characterize Corden’s turn in One Man as “so consistently hilarious that you might just fall off your couch and knock out the dog with your tumbling laptop.”

Continuing with his healing theme, Jones added, “They should be piping this glorious thing into hospital wards with the oxygen.  Laughter heals, folks!  And, yes, you can snort and guffaw right into your mask.”

For what Jones dubbed “one of [the National Theatre’s] greatest hits of all time,” Hytner mounted a “rip-roaring production” that “nods not just at Commedia but British pantomime and American vaudeville, with Corden a presence both retro and contemporary.” 

Jones concluded that One Man “might not be the funniest thing you ever saw, but it will be right up there, I promise, and at just the right moment.”

Apparently, at least as far as the NT Live production is concerned, the Aussies just overlooked the jibes at their homeland.  I found two reviews of the streamed performances, and neither one even mentioned the Australia jokes.  (I didn’t examine the reviews of the London production’s tour of Australia or the two or three local productions—it seems that Bean’s reluctance eased later and he allowed Australian companies to stage the play.)

In the Rock City Jester of Canberra, Australia, John Lombard labeled One Man Two Guvnors, “a fizzy farce set in the swinging sixties.”  Characterizing the production as “hilarious,” Lombard reported that Bean “spices the elaborate plot by making the monied patriarchs of the [Commedia] original into genteel mobsters.”

With a “sublime” cast “with irresistible energy, immaculate timing and crafty character observation,” director Hytner, the reviewer affirmed, “tells the story with panache, wisely anchoring the comedy in aching longing.” 

Lombard found, “The sense of time and place is extraordinary, with cockney accents [they’re actually northern English accents], popping primary colour costumes and slight rattiness in set perfectly evoking 60s Brighton.”

The review-writer also felt the skiffle band The Craze “are the cherry on top of the sundae, with their musical interludes adding tremendously to the sense of fun and place.”  Lombard concluded by asserting that the “National Theatre’s One Man Two Guvnors is a banquet of entertainment.”

Nary a mention of the Australian put-downs!

'Toast'

“I love work plays,” says British playwright Richard Bean (One Man, Two Guvnors).  “Work has hierarchy, hope, ambition, need, compromise, tragedy, and comedy.”  Bean has reason to know, largely from his own lived experience before turning to writing plays for a living.  “Work,” he continues, “is society touching the individual.  Work is the individual engaging in society.”  The  writer knows a little something of this aspect of human endeavor as well, as you’ll soon learn.  “Often the language is richer, saltier for sure, but also more revealing.”  And there you have three aspects of Bean’s creds as a playwright: a worker, someone familiar with the functioning of the human mind, and a writer with a practiced ear for both ordinary speech and a funny line.  All of these are manifested in his 1999 serio-comic study of men at work, Toast, in its U.S. première at 59E59 Theaters.

Richard Bean, 60 next month, was born in Hull, England, the East Yorkshire port city that’s also the home town of his younger colleague in the playwriting dodge, Tom Wells (Jumpers for Goalposts; see my report posted on 23 May 2015).  Bean’s father was a policeman and his mother was a hairdresser.  Hull, where Toast is set, is a port city of a quarter million inhabitants on the Humber Estuary, about 198 miles north of London and 61 miles east of Leeds.  (Hull has been named the U.K. City of Culture for 2017.)  After grammar school, when he was 18, Bean worked in a bread plant before leaving to study social psychology at Loughborough University in Leicestershire (108 miles southwest of Hull).  He worked as an occupational psychologist for 15 years in the personnel and training departments of factory businesses and as a stand-up comic from 1989 to 1994 before turning to playwriting; he’s said both professions have been useful to his writing, as has his life in Hull among the fishermen (Under the Whaleback, 2003) and his year at the bread factory, which became the setting for Toast. 

Coming to playwriting late in his life, he says he had “no connection with the arts” until he was 30.  “Theatre wasn’t part of my life,” Bean admits.  Having graduated with a science degree, Bean had little background in literature, so he began reading on his own after university.  “Specifically I started reading Henry Miller, [Jack] Kerouac, [John] Steinbeck, and [Joseph] Conrad—just for fun really,” the playwright explained, “but it was Henry Miller who corrupted me just through serendipity.”  Bean was working in the personnel office of a telecommunications company when he began reading Tropic of Capricorn, Miller’s account “of his life in New York and Brooklyn.”  Bean discovered that Miller, too, was employed in the personnel office of a telecommunications company—“and so, bit by bit, I started writing.”

Bean’s first attempts at writing led him into stand-up comedy.  He came to playwriting by chance, in a way, when he saw a production of David Storey’s play The Changing Room; the Naturalism of the staging was Bean’s first influence in theatrical style.  “I thought it was rather boring as I sat and watched it, and then theatre magic worked on me, I couldn’t get it out of my head, and then I realized how I might dramatize my year’s work at a mass production bread factory.”  That play became Toast. 

His work in the bread plant gave Bean more than just bread-baking stories:

The year I spent working in a factory was the best for becoming a writer because I was doing six 12 hour shifts a week standing listening to dialogue.  When you do boring factory work, if you’ve got the opportunity to talk you’re talking to entertain each other.  You go deeper and deeper and get more and more intimate.  For me that year spent working in the bakery was the best year of my life in terms of becoming a playwright.

Bean began writing plays in the early 1990s, penning some radio sketches and the libretto for an opera, Paradise of Fools (1995) by Stephen McNeff.  His first full-length play, Of Rats and Men, set in a psychology lab, was staged in 1996 at London’s Canal Cafe Theatre and went on to the Edinburgh Festival; he adapted the play for BBC Radio in 1997.  His next stage play, Bean’s first major work, was Toast in 1999, presented at the Royal Court Upstairs in London.  Since then, he’s written 25 plays, including a musical (Made in Dagenham, 2014) and his hit Broadway début, One Man, Two Guvnors, which premièred at the National Theatre’s Lyttleton Theatre in London in May 2011, directed by Nicholas Hytner, prior to going on tour in the United Kingdom before landing in London’s West End in November 2011.  It opened on Broadway in April 2012, winning the 2012 Tony for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play for James Corden and receiving six other Tony nominations; One Man also won three 2012 Drama Desk Awards and the 2012 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Broadway Play.  In 2011 Bean became the first dramatist to win the Evening Standard Award for Best Play for two plays, One Man and The Heretic.  His future plans include two new plays to be staged in Hull in 2017 as part of the City of Culture year: The Hypocrite, about Hull’s part in the English Civil War of 1642-51, and an untitled play about stand-up comedians.

Bean’s original title for Toast was Wonderloaf, which happens to be the brand name of the bread the playwright spent 12 months making in the Hull factory.  But Homepride Spillers, the bakery company, objected and set their lawyers on Bean and the play was retitled just before opening at the Royal Court.  “I still actually have a ticket with Wonderloaf printed on it,” says Bean, one of the very few left, he claims.  After the hit début at the Royal Court, Toast was revived in March 2007 at the Hull Truck Theatre in Bean’s home town.  It was remounted again in August 2014 at the Park Theatre, London, by Snapdragon Productions, which subsequently went on tour in the U.K. from February to April 2016 before coming to New York City as part of the 59E59 Theaters’ Brits Off-Broadway 2016 series from 20 April to 22 May.  (A brief profile of the 59E59 Theaters appears in my report on Summer Shorts 2015, posted on 12 August 2015.)  The production opened in Theater A on 1 May and my friend Diana and I caught it on Saturday evening, 7 May. 

In April 2004, Brits Off Broadway débuted at the 59E59 Theater under the leadership of Elysabeth Kleinhans, the theaters’ artistic director, and Scottish-born executive producer Peter Tear; this season marks the annual tradition’s twelfth year of bringing provocative British theater to the U.S.  Along with 59E59’s main offerings, the 5A Season, Brits Off Broadway is one of the three main series presented by the Off Broadway facility.  The other two are Summer Shorts (on which I reported in the post referenced above) and East to Edinburgh (see my report on Bette Davis Ain’t for Sissies, 17 August 2015), both annual occurrences.  Brits Off Broadway is a festival of new works from British writers, performers, and companies, presenting between six and 12 productions in all three of 59E59’s houses during the months of April, May, and June. 

Brits Off Broadway draws presentations from across the British Isles, including the less-represented Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.  While there are shows from the National Theatre, the Bristol Old Vic, and the Leicester Haymarket Theatre, many are from small companies, from emerging and established talents alike.  “We’re bringing the stuff that would never, could never be seen on Broadway—small-scaled shows, one-person shows that deserve to find a wider audience but aren’t appropriate for commercial theaters uptown or downtown," explained Kleinhans.  59E59 scouts regularly visit Britain to select the best of British theater.  For theatergoers wary of festivals as “grab bags full of unknown, untested work,” the New York Times’ Christopher Isherwood assures them, “For Brits Off Broadway, Mr. Tear and Ms. Kleinhans have already done the hard work.  They’ve fixed the odds for you.”  In 2006, Isherwood dubbed the third festival “a highlight of the theatrical year in New York.”  

In addition to this season’s presentation of Bean’s first major work, Brits Off Broadway has offered productions of plays by such writers as Alan Ayckbourn, John Osborne, Peter Nichols, Steven Berkoff, Ian Kelly, Gary Owen from Wales, Northern Ireland’s Richard Dormer, and Scottish writer Gregory Burke; among the Brits Off Broadway productions have been numerous U.S. premières.  Casts have included such performers as two-time Oscar nominee Brenda Blethyn, Ewen Bremner, and Celia Imrie. 

Toast is set in the dirty, drab canteen (break room) of a Hull bread factory in 1975, where the workers spend their off-time.  The cast is made up of a crew of working-class men, including former trawlermen from when Hull was a busy fishing port, whose jobs are in jeopardy because the company has upgraded a newer plant over an hour’s drive away.  The owners have been neglecting the Hull bakery, which is constantly breaking down, and once it can no longer sustain its usefulness, it’ll be closed down.  (The workers don’t only have their livelihoods to worry about if the plant closes: for most of them, the factory’s what fills their days.  As one of them says, if they weren’t at work, they’d just be idle.)  Meanwhile, the workers are left alone in the bakery on a Sunday shift, as no management personnel come to the plant; as one of the workers puts it, the Hull factory’s a goldmine for the owners: “They don’t have to manage it, maintain it, or invest in it.”

The action begins as the workers assemble at the start of one Sunday-night shift.  The boss, Mr. Beckett (never seen, but the subject of shop talk and often on the other end of the occasional phone conversation), tells the shift foreman that an order went wrong earlier so the late shift will have to work until 4 a.m. baking 3,000 extra loaves of bread.  Reactions are mixed, but the men realize that the order must be filled.  As a clock above the entrance marks the time, the six bread-makers (soon joined by a seventh, the “spare wank,” whose presence as a relief worker is mandated by labor contract when a shift goes to 12 hours) come and go, either for their “half-hours” (meal break) or their “smokes” (10- or 15-minute tea breaks).  We get to know the men as they banter with one another.  (If you’re wondering where I got all that jargon and the translations, the theater kindly provides a glossary, necessary for both the work slang and the Yorkshire dialect they all speak.)

Blakey (Steve Nicolson) is the “chargehand,” the shift foreman (though he isn’t “management”), for which he’s paid a whole 10 pence more an hour than his co-workers.  Blakey must watch his back, though, because shop steward Colin (Will Barton—who vaguely resembles Walter Matthau when he played heavies) is brown-nosing Mr. Beckett.  (Is he named so resonantly because all the men are waiting for their own kind of Godot?  Is the factory canteen Bean’s industrial stand-in for a barren country road with its lone, leafless tree?)  Peter (Matt Sutton) hates his job at the bread plant but needs it badly and worries how he’ll be able to support his family if the plant closes.  Dezzie (Kieran Knowles), a former “deckie” on a fishing trawler (with disgusting stories to tell), has just moved to a new house—which has given his wife a sex drive that pleases him—and also delights Cecil (Simon Greenall) who loves to hear about it because “he isn’t getting any.”  (What else delights Cecil is goosing Peter from behind in a blitz attack.)  This leaves only the pitiable Nellie (Matthew Kelly) from the regular shift, a burnt-out shell of a man from working 80-hour weeks for 45 years (he started at the bakery when he was 14 and doesn’t expect to retire for another six years).  When the six shift-members have arrived, the “temp,” Lance (John Wark), who claims to be a mature student in social history but turns out to be very different from the articulate and well read fellow we meet at his arrival, shows up as the spare wank.

Small crises occur throughout the night—Nellie, the “mixer” (the guy who makes the dough), manages to lose his undershirt somehow and the workers have to find it lest it wind up in someone’s loaf of bread the next day—until shortly before quitting time a serious mishap takes place, threatening a shut-down of the oven.  If that occurs, it’d take eight hours for the oven to cool and another five for it to reheat.  The men’s jobs completely depend on avoiding that.  On their own, and not wanting to report the problem to Mr. Beckett until they’ve tried to fix it—even at the risk of their own lives—the seven bakery workers scramble to set things right before the shift ends.

In the course of two hours (including an intermission), Toast depicts (if you’ll pardon the pun) a slice of factory life more than a beginning-middle-and-end narrative.  The milieu’s a hermetically sealed environment, with its own customs and practices and its own language, some of it Yorkshire slang (sarnies for sandwiches, tatties for potatoes) and some of it bakery-worker jargon (spare wank, half-hour, smoke, chargehand, mixer).  It’s also a character study of sorts, except the “character” is a team, six long-time co-workers and one newcomer.  Toast shows us individuals engaging in one very specific society. 

Toast was a disappointment, however.  Not only was the New York Times review of the current production positive, but so were all the notices I looked up for various London stagings between 1999 and 2014, but the play doesn’t live up to the hype.  The acting and directing, however, are excellent (although the thick Yorkshire dialect is hard to follow).  It’s a Naturalistic play (with a hint of Pinterism), but it’s also a snapshot of one shift at a bread factory so there’s not really a plot or a theme—or a conclusion.  The shift ends, so the play just stops.  I haven’t seen any of Bean’s other work (including One Man), so I don’t know if his writing is usually this faux-documentary style—I presume his adaptations more or less follow the plots of the original sources, but I can’t guess about the others.  

I can’t argue with the truthfulness of Bean’s depiction of this world—in fact, my impression is that it’s very accurate, and certainly the performances ring true—but the play lacks dramatic impact beyond a few emotional and psychological highs that come and go without leaving much behind.  Not only do the characters generally shrug off all incidents during the shift, it’s pretty clear that there won’t be any repercussions the next day or anytime thereafter.  The only change this night, an accident really, is the introduction of Lance, who may or may not be unbalanced (he’s a patient at the De la Pole Hospital, a mental asylum), but all he manages to do is toss a few momentary surprises at a couple of the workers, unbeknownst to any of the others so there aren’t any ripples beyond the moment.  Lance doesn’t actually disrupt the night’s work, much less any of the men’s focus.  Only the prospect of the plant’s closing, throwing the men all out of work, hangs over the characters like Joe Btfsplk’s dark cloud—and it’s a rumor which may or may not happen and isn’t actually in the offing during the play, making it only a subliminal threat.

I said, though, that the Snapdragon production of Toast is excellent.  Eleanor Rhode, director of this revival from the 2014 Park Theatre presentation that went on tour around England, stages the 59E59 visit, produced in association with London’s Jagged Fence Theater, with sureness and clarity.  On James Turner’s shabby canteen set, strewn with months of tossed trash (watch the wastebasket as it overflows with used teabags) and flour, under harsh, overhead industrial lighting by Mike Robertson, Rhode creates a whole world inhabited by just six people (with the occasional temporary addition of an outsider).  We can spy bits of the rest of the baking plant through the canteen doors’ glass panels (also clouded with flour dust), but it’s a hazy, ambiguous “elsewhere” that mostly exists for us from the evocative noises contributed by sound designer Max Pappenheim; the only real place is the one room where life happens.  (For the most part, except for Lance, who wears his street clothes—a little neater and nattier than what the others arrive in—the men wear work clothes of well-used white trousers, shirts, and aprons and flour-covered workmen’s brogans.  The look was designed by Holly Rose Henshaw.) 

Even though it was difficult to follow all the Yorkshire-inflected dialogue (that’s the same region in which Downton Abbey is set, but the TV show, even among the downstairs folk, was created with a trans-Atlantic audience in mind; Bean made no concession for us monolingual Americans), believing the truthfulness of the bakery men is never in question.  (It became more effective not to struggle to catch and interpret each word or phrase but just to let the underlying intentions, nicely conveyed by the cast’s physicalizations, communicate to me.)   What these guys do and how they do it was as real for me as a cinéma verité, and the collective work among the actors, whether there are two men on stage or all seven, was actually thrilling see.  (When the six regular shift workers are alone, I had no doubt they knew each other intimately and over a long time.  Lance’s presence suitably makes the others a little hesitant.)  If the play’s composed as a picture of a certain moment in the life of the bakery, Rhode doesn’t impose a structure that Bean didn’t intend: the performance seems to unfold in its natural rhythm, just as a Sunday night shift would (if 12 hours could be compressed into two).  There are lulls, silences, and slow intervals, interrupted now and then by frenetic, high-energy interludes.  As an exercise in acting and directing, you couldn’t want a better example.

Within the ensemble, each character stands out in his own way.  Arguably the most salient is Nellie (actually Walter Nelson, but everyone call him Nellie even though he prefers Walter), compellingly played with lumbering, monosyllabic aloofness—he’s part of the shift, but he’s not one of the gang—by Matthew Kelly.  He’s the old man of the team—not so much because he’s older than everyone else (I’m not so sure he is), but because he’s worked in the plant forever, it seems, having given it his childhood, his youth, and now his middle age.  (One description of Kelly’s bakery worker that I like—because it’s both perceptive and apt—emphasized “his floury hair and doughy features resembling the bread he bakes.”)  One co-worker calculates that Nellie’s baked 220 million loaves in his time at the factory.  Nellie’s not so much a leader as the shift mascot.  Kelly, an Olivier Award–winner (for Lennie in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, 2004), plays Nellie with a mix of one part tiredness and one part resignation.  In fact, when Lance, in his first time revealing his strangeness, tells Nellie he foresees that the old mixer’s going to die tonight, Nellie’s nonplussed. 

John Wark’s Lance resembles a slimmer Josh Mostel (from the ’70s) or Wayne Knight (from the ’80s), but somewhat more troublesome.  He shifts from comically peculiar to mysterious and weird without passing through any intermediate stages—and it’s hard to tell, the first time he does his eerie bit, whether he’s some kind of other-worldly creature Bean invented to tip over the Naturalistic world he’d maintained up till then, or some kind of kook.  He pretty much kept me guessing, although on his second go I was fairly certain he was just unbalanced somehow, until Blakey supplied some missing facts.  It’s regrettable that Bean doesn’t make more use of this character, who, in the end, has little effect on the action.  Wark creates a stand-out figure in the insular world of Toast but never really gets to go anywhere with it.

The other characters on the shift, though each is delineated distinctly by both Bean’s script and the actors’ characterizations, really only exist in association with their shiftmates.  Steve Nicolson’s Blakey, who’s spent some time in jail, is hard and cheerless, with divided loyalties as the shift chargehand who’s responsible to Mr. Beckett and the company on one side and to the men of his shift who depend on him to maintain their livelihoods on the other.  As shop steward Colin, Will Barton is subtly two-faced, appearing to look out for his coworkers as fellow union men but eying Blakey’s job and the 10 p.-an-hour raise that goes with it.  Cecil is the jokester in the gang, and Simon Greenall plays him with a slight edge that made me wonder if his jokes and clowning aren’t just a might desperate, even cruel, to fill an essentially empty life.  (Cecil’s the character who says, “I’m either here or I’m fishing, and I don’t really like fishing.”)  Kieran Knowles’s former deckie Dezzie, the youngest on the team and a man with more strength than smarts (he can’t remember his new address or phone number), is focused on his new wife and new home—he’s thinking ahead to his half-hour when he plans to rush home for a few minutes with the wife—and keeps himself at a slight remove from his shiftmates.  Peter, as played by Matt Sutton, is the shift’s cynic and anti-establishmentarian who grouses about nearly everything—and is the butt of most of Cecil’s hijinks.  With long, stringy hair, he wears flared jeans (remember bellbottoms?) instead of the white work pants the other regulars wear, making him look a little like a hippie in this working-class enclave, almost as out of place as Lance.  He brings a deck of cards to work with him to pass the time on his breaks, but he’s also quick to anger and challenge Blakey to a fight. 

Show-Score, the website that tallies theater reviews, reported that 59E59’s Toast received 68% positive reviews (of 22 surveyed), 14% negative, and 18% mixed.  Overall, the site gave the production a score of 72.  (I recalculated the stats posted on the site because Show-Score included U.K. reviews of earlier presentations.  I counted only reviews of the New York performance.)  Among the highest scoring notices was Ben Brantley’s in the New York Times.  Brantley called Toast a “trenchant . . . comedy of the rhythms of a blue-collar workday” that’s “a shrewd and poignant study of how rote work defines those who perform it.”  The play, the Timesman observed, “isn’t easy to classify”: “It combines the frenzy of farce with the creeping incremental detail of kitchen-sink realism. And there’s always the sense of a desperate emptiness lurking beneath the rowdy humor.”  He reported that “as directed by Eleanor Rhode,” the play’s “acted by a vigorous cast.” In the end, Brantley declared, “Joking, teasing and roughhousing—like making bread in an assembly line—are all just diversions to keep people from thinking about the final nothingness that awaits them. . . .  That ‘Toast’ is shadowed by this awareness doesn’t keep it from being boisterously entertaining.”  In the Epoch Times, Barry Bassis called Toast “a comedy but with serious undertones” and a “winner from across the pond” that “has an air of authenticity.”  Bassis affirmed, “And the cast is superb.” 

In her brief paragraph on the production, Elisabeth Vincentelli warned in the New York Post, “Even if you loved ‘One Man, Two Guvnors’ on Broadway . . .  you may want to think twice before checking out ‘Toast’” because “it’s a slog.”  “Nothing much happens,” Vincentelli complained, “and the elliptical dialogue is made even more impenetrable by the working-class northern English accents.”  The Post reviewer acknowledged, “Things marginally pick up in the second act—if you make it that far,” but then concluded, “Sadly, this loaf takes way too long to rise.”   Cautioning that Toast isn’t “for the gluten intolerant,” Alexis Soloski wrote in the U.S. edition of the Guardian, that the play’s “a flour-crusted portrait of a group of men working the weekend shift at a bread factory” that “resembles a social realist drama (with a few less successful gestures toward the preternatural).”  Toast “also displays . . . mordant and sometimes cruel humor,” observed Soloski.  “The situation is somewhat formulaic and so is the plotting,” the Guardian review-writer noted, “but Bean manages something distinctive, too, giving each of the men a distinctive voice.”  Soloski characterized the production as “finely detailed,” but demurred slightly, adding, “perhaps too finely.  The scurf of flour that coats the break room had a way of creeping up the theater’s center aisle and the factory thrum of Max Pappenheim’s sound design confused at least one patron, who asked an usher to silence the noise.”  (That never happened the night I saw the play—but it suggests how Naturalistic the staging was.)  “The performances are playful and mostly un-showy,” continued the reviewer, “and the 70s dress and hairstyles, courtesy costume designer Holly Rose Henshaw, are a slightly repulsive treat.” 

In the New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town” column, the reviewer noted that Bean “hymns the pleasures and the sorrows of hard work in this genial comedy.”  The notice concluded (with a good pun!), “Leavened with pungent slang and bawdy humor—the ensemble works together as smoothly as the best assembly line—the play conjures a bygone world of industrial work, as doomed to obsolescence as the bakers themselves.”  In Time Out New York, Sandy MacDonald dismissed Toast, saying that “it’s tough to drum up much interest in this 1999 throwback” as Bean “evidently learned a thing or two in the wake of this, his first play—like how to jump right into the action and not waste a good half-hour establishing character.”  MacDonald had complaints about the acting as well, asserting that “Kelly cartoonishly indicates Nellie’s fright and confusion rather than authentically embodying the emotions, so the effect comes at one remove” and that “Wark telegraphs Lance’s oddity so pointedly (abrupt tonal shifts, bugged eyes) that you’d have to be facing a clear and present threat to your livelihood not to notice that there’s something seriously amiss.”

David Finkle, Huffington Post’s “First Nighter,” putting Toast in a new subgenre he named “gang comedy-dramas,” linked Bean’s play with Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew at the Atlantic Theater Company (Sandy MacDonald made the same connection in TONY) in which “blue-collar workers gather at the rest-and-relaxation room and get caught up in their factory’s potentially shutting down.”  Toast is “a strong play for the season getting underway” and awarded “a championship bread loaf . . . to the seven character men who make up the cast” and affirmed that Bean “has the right cast, the right director in Eleanor Rhode and the right set designer in James Turner” to pull off his chronicle of “the slow death of the industrial economy in England.”  On Theater Online, Heather Violanti described the 59E59 production of Toast as “exquisite” due to “Rhode’s clear-eyed direction and the ensemble[‘]s sincere, never-indulgent performances” which “bring Bean’s prodigious work to brilliant, heartfelt life.”  The play’s focus is “on the hard realities of working class,” though “Bean wraps up the play’s conflicts a little too neatly.”  Nonetheless, “the richly drawn, empathetic characters and expertly observed sense of workplace dynamics keep the play compelling.”  The company creates “an effortless, finely observed sense of ensemble” by which “you believe these men have been working together for years.”  In conclusion, Violanti dubbed Toast “a not-to-be-missed production” and punned that it’s “perhaps the toast of this year’s Brits Off Broadway festival.”

Susan Hasho of Theater Pizzazz affirmed, “The pace of this play is slow and the payoff might seem subtle, except that this production affords a feast of notable character actors, in perfect ensemble, performing small, detailed moments beautifully full of life and significance.”  Toast “[s]lowly . . . reveals the idiosyncratic connections between the men and the hopeless strain they are under” as Bean “creates a microcosm in which we can see a world of despair” while “the humor in the play humanizes the plight in both stark and gentle ways.”  The TP reviewer asserts that “as an audience,” we “are gathered into this life by the pace and the intricacy of the characters and their relationships.”  On TheaterScene, Rachel Goddard thought that Bean “allows the audience” for Toast “to be the fly on the wall of a bread factory break room”  Toast “is full of humor with moments of intense drama,” asserted Goddard, “[w]ith ingenuously boorish and precisely written characters” portrayed by “a strong ensemble cast.”  Characterizing Rhode’s direction as “brilliant,” TheaterScene’s reviewer felt, “Overall the performances were impressive and gave a slightly stagnant plot, life and motion.”

Asya Danilova of the blog OnStage felt that the audience of Toast “truly feels as though they are traveling in space and time” to the time and place of the play’s setting.  But “Toast is often unpredictable,” warned the reviewer. The canteen set, wrote Danilova, “is meticulously buil[t] and painfully realistic” and Pappenheim’s soundscape “is as subtle as it is scrupulous.”  The “brilliant cast . . . delivers some warm and gentle comedy,” though Danilova refused to call the play either a comedy or a “workplace drama.”  She didn’t put a label on Toast, but described it “as a tapestry of charismatic bread factory workers dealing with the crisis and enjoy it this way.”  The OnStage blogger summed up with: “But to me the most interesting experience was being caught when I wanted plot ‘candy’, that metaphysical twist, and didn’t quite get it.  Instead of that I got more ‘bread’, the everyday peoples’ collisions.  The bread is more nutritious than candy though.  When it’s made just right it’s the greatest food you can have.”  On Broadway World, Marina Kennedy described Toast as “a humorous, yet intensely realistic depiction of factory life” through which Bean was able “to capture his subject perfectly.”  The production’s “stellar cast” delivers “a collective performance that is absolutely compelling” which, Kennedy thought, makes “an entertaining and appealing show that brings a real sense of humanity to the stage.” 

Stage Buddy’s Tania Fisher declared, “If you’re a fan of British theater and want to enjoy some fine acting, then you may want to help yourself to a slice of Toast.”  Fisher called Toast a “quirky play” that “tells the amusing story of an English bread factory in 1975” and generates “a strong sense of ensemble among the all-male cast” who “portray fully-realized characters with great skill and talent”; designer Turner’s set “reaches new heights in its impeccable attention to detail.”  Though our Stage Buddy found the first act “rather slow paced,” she reported that act two was “faster paced.”  Troubles with the Yorkshire accent and “the British sense of humor” aside, Fisher concluded that “it is easy to warm to every character in this offbeat story.”  CurtainUp’s review-writer Charles Wright characterized Toast as “a slice-of-life comedy about hardships on the bottom rung of the industrial ladder” whose “seven actors, under director Eleanor Rhode, are giving performances as balanced and precise as a top-flight chamber-music ensemble.”  Toast’s “physical world,” as envisioned by Turner and Robertson, “is sunless and grime-encrusted, with a dusting of flour” and “just right,” asserted Wright, “and entirely believable.” 

[What you don’t get from my review survey above—because I didn’t quote all the attempts at humor—are the myriad puns on bread and baking that nearly every reviewer slipped into his or her notice.  (I did it, too, a little, but I yield the field to the many other writers who outstripped my poor efforts.)  Some plays just seem to lend themselves to that sort of writing—just as Something Rotten!, on which I just reported (14 May), called the review-writers to come up with musical-related and Shakespeare-oriented quips—and a play about baking bread is just too much of a temptation to resist.  Some puns were better than others, of course.  I guess some writers just rose to the occasion and others simply fell flat.  (Sorry.  Couldn’t help myself)]