Walter "Nellie" Nelson is a good mixer. Not in the social sense, as his conversation is limited to monosyllables and he works nights in an industrial bakery. But it is estimated that over his 40-year career, Nellie has mixed more than 2m loaves. Not even Jesus produced that many.
The author of Toast, Richard Bean, spent a year on the graveyard shift in a northern bread factory, and knows what it is like to live in thrall to an oven. These pasty, red-eyed reprobates are hopelessly cut adrift from the normal patterns of society. They have beds they never sleep in and wives they never see. Chargehand Blakey is an embittered ex-con. Dezzie is a former trawlerman who finds that breadmaking has all of the isolation of life at sea but none of the romance. "At least me wife used to wave me off at the quayside," he laments. "But I ain't gonna die here, am I?"
Bean brilliantly animates the dehumanising aspects of industrial production. These men are responsible for a machine that must never be allowed to seize up or cool down. Their lives are dedicated to satisfying the great maw of the furnace, which seems to assume the capricious, determining power of Pinter's Dumb Waiter.
Jeremy Herrin's production is full of painfully well-observed performances: Trevor Fox is a taciturn, terrifying Blakey; David Nellist's Dezzie bottles up his sexual energy like a shaken quart of champagne; Michael Gunn's Nellie is a heartbreaking, doughy lump of a man. And there is some excellent steely-eyed work from John Lloyd Fillingham as a disturbed student who seems unlikely to last the shift.
As ever with this writer, the dialogue sweats sour, black comedy from every pore. But then, you would expect Bean to go well with Toast.
· Until December 11. Box office: 0191-232 1232.
