TOAST Will Come to Edinburgh Fringe
Performances will run Thursday 7th- Monday 31st August.
TOAST will come to Edinburgh Fringe. Performances will run at Summerhall (Dissection Room), 1 Summerhall, Edinburgh, EH9 1PL Thursday 7th- Monday 31st August, 12:10.
Selected as one of only five winners of the Shedload-of-Future Fund 2026 from Francesca Moody’s Sheinburgh, TOAST is a debut written and performed by Jude Green: an unrelenting comedy about starving for your art. A brutally funny, gut-punching exploration of broken systems, broken promises, and broken artists, and what is left behind when they fail.
We follow a creative spiralling down a rabbit hole as negotiations with employers, agents and Universal Credit begin to unravel. Drawing on lived experience, Jude Green delivers an absurd, biting takedown of the UK benefits system, the cost-of-living crisis, and the question of whether we value art more than the people who make it. Directed by Scottish theatre-maker Debbie Hannan (The Hen Night, Play, Pie and a Pint; Educating Rita, Dundee Rep) and starring Green alongside Jack Wakely, Artistic Director of the award-winning company Silent Faces, this chaotic, funny and moving two-hander asks what happens when survival and broken systems collide. As phone calls go unanswered, systems close ranks and every avenue seems blocked, they keep swinging. But the biggest and most absurd twist of all may be that the only way out is to make a play about food poverty.
An honest, unflinching take on survival versus acting, and what it means to pursue a life in the arts in a world that does not prioritise it. It is an urgent deep dive into a flawed UK benefits system that is so broken it becomes almost laughable. Vitally supported by those who’ve been through it, it exposes the ridiculousness of how survival is treated like a joke everyone is expected to accept in society. It puts a spotlight on those who are pushed to the edge for their work with nowhere to turn and nothing to fall back on, and finds humour in the chaos and the constant demand to just cope and carry on.
Jude Green, writer, comments, The Actors Trust published research earlier this year that showed the majority of actors they surveyed were living in poverty. That’s wild isn’t it? It’s one of those things that we all know is happening but never talk about. The amount of us depending on benefits and unstable day-jobs is immense, and it feels like there’s so much shame about that, about not being good enough or everyone being right that this was a terrible idea and you should go get a proper job. I think you get to a point though where that shame is expensive and you can’t afford it. That’s why ‘Toast’ exists. I hope it gives people a space where they can laugh at the big horrible thing for an hour, and be in a room full of other people who get the joke.
A frenetic and fiercely human exploration of theatre, welfare and survival, the show shines a light on a system that leaves many artists balancing on a knife-edge, where every pound matters and making art can come at a devastating personal cost. TOAST is a blisteringly smart rallying cry wrapped in comedy asking why this is normalised, and whether we’ve all just learned to accept the taste of burnt toast rather than ever expecting something better.
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