Of all the unappealing job titles in the world, they do not get much worse than Spare Wank. Richard Bean became one in 1975, spending his gap year hauling hot tins of dough around a hellish industrial bread plant in Hull.
The experience gave him an insight into the Beckettian horror of endless shifts feeding the maw of a giant oven which must never be allowed to cool down - not to mention the sheer ignominy of crawling up the pay scale to attain the position of Full Wank.
First performed in 1999, Toast has become the central pillar of a trilogy of tough, unsentimental comedies about food production methods. Bean's first hit, Under the Whaleback, chronicled the lives of Hull trawlermen. More recently, Harvest, a pig-farming family saga, won the Critics' Circle Award for best new play last year.
Surprisingly, Toast has never been performed in its place of origin. Gareth Tudor Price's revival has an acrid, eye-watering quality that makes the ill-fumigated factory feel uncomfortably close to home. Richard Foxton's set looks like the staff canteen of Dante's Inferno, a grim ante-chamber that never sees the light of day, still less a health-and-safety inspection. When one batch of loaves proves unusually stringy, it is because a plant worker has lost his vest in the mix - a true story.
Bean's scenario presages the current insanity of food-miles: the workers' jobs are threatened because it is cheaper to transport bread from Bradford than to bake it in Hull. And he provides a poignant eulogy to the obsolescence of the closed-shop - after two crippling strikes the staff are back on worse terms than they had before.
There are some fine performances, not least from Edward Peel's mountainous, monosyllabic Walter, a man who has mixed so many loaves in his career that he appears to be formed from a large, discoloured lump of dough himself. Every time he comes into view you can see the terror in the other men's eyes that this is what they are doomed to become. Bean at least managed to avoid this fate, though his salty, compassionate comedy has the taste of true-lived experience.
· Until March 24. Box office: 01482 323638
