Immersive, Engrossing Theatre — Even if it’s a Little Too Neat

A People You Know Production

Directed by Ava Cecile Reid Samans and Maisie Michaelson-Friend

Written by Maisie Michaelson-Friend

Produced by Charlotte Gruendling

Reviewed by Callisto Lodwick

Where will you be in ten years? While some of us might like to imagine university stretching on forever (and a few of those will make that dream a reality and turn a panic masters into a panic PhD), the vast majority will have been forced, cajoled, and unceremoniously shoved into a world of office work and mortgages and—perhaps worst of all—the needling desire to get hitched. And if, by miracle of miracles, you do manage to tie the knot, another terrifying question awaits: who can you invite to the wedding?

This question is the jumping-off point for People You Know Productions’ latest show, Toast, written by Maisie Michaelson-Friend, which she codirected with Ava Cecile Reid Samans. Years after graduating, Dan (Matt McCaffrey) and Tash (Iris Hedley) are celebrating their engagement, and have invited a handful of their closest friends over for a more intimate get-together before the rest of the guests arrive. By happy coincidence, Dan’s uni flatmate Ollie (Theo MacKenzie) has entered a spectacularly one-sided open relationship with Tash’s best friend Margot (Liza Vasilyeva): the two inject their own tensions into the seemingly-happy couple’s matrimony. What could go wrong? The answer, unsurprisingly, is an awful lot, not helped by the accidental invite of an old friend of Dan’s (Harry, played by Callum Wardman-Browne) that no one particularly wants to see.

Dan and Tash: the happy couple? Source: People You Know

‘Imagine your friend group meeting in ten years’ time,’ instructs Samans. ‘Do you think you’d really know these people?’ Michaelson-Friend agrees: ‘knowing someone for such a long time can make you turn a blind eye to certain things. Inspiration for the play stemmed from the experience of thinking you know someone and then realising that person has changed. I had to make a decision.’

Watching the group implode is certainly its own brand of macabre fun. Toast’s staging in the round—which the directors said was intended to lend a ‘fly on the wall’ experience—means that the actors’ interactions with one another are tinged with sly looks behind backs and grimaces on the far side of hugs. The nature of the medium does mean some of these plays are missed by parts of the audience—often you’ll hear a laugh and not be able to see the thing that prompted it—but the staging flows along so elegantly and naturalistically you quickly forget it. It helps that the actors possess a gift for toeing the line between sympathy and disgust: each character is a mess.

Yet no matter how unstudied the actors seem, it’s impossible to forget that Toast is a play instead of a window into a friend’s living room. The central plot twist is hinted at so heavily that the play turns into a suspenseful wait for the characters to unveil the truth, a-la Oedipus Rex, rather than a reveal that will truly surprise the audience. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing—not every play needs to be an Agatha Christie—but the play is so otherwise natural that the artificial boundaries of contained drama jut out further than they would in a more abstract piece of theatre.

The group together. Source: People You Know

But once you think you’ve got Toast all figured out, it cuts to black, leaving an uncomfortably open ending. ‘The play doesn’t have an answer, nor is it trying to show any kind of allegory,’ explains Samans. ‘You have to draw your own conclusion. Hopefully by the end you’ll have felt strongly enough you think you can figure it out’. The play certainly is good at making you feel things: tension balances on a knife’s edge throughout the show, toppling off into bursts of fury at moments that send the theatre into a drawn hush. Samans believes the emotion stems from the universality of the experiences Michaelson-Friend has described: ‘lots of other People You Know shows have been an exploration of a group—for instance, Trust was about uber-rich, and Rat Race was a group of boys coming back together. But this play isn't about any group—rather, it’s the kinds of relationships you can build with anyone’. How effective the play is at eliciting different responses from the audience remains to be seen — I have a feeling most will side with the typically ‘good’ character. Yet at show’s end I felt myself leaning the other direction — though perhaps that’s just my dramatic penchant for tortured, messy relationships winning the day.

How relatable the play will be for its mostly university-aged audience thankfully lurks murkily in the future. But for anyone who has ever struggled with the morality of losing a friend—or simply wants to see a particularly engrossing piece of theatre—Toast makes for a fascinating evening.