Review: BURNT TOAST, Battersea Arts Centre

It’s difficult to say at which exact point during Susie Wang’s Burnt Toast I noticed that my jaw had dropped and stayed dropped. If Sarah Kane’s Blasted had been set in Fawlty Towers, it may have turned out something like this.

It starts off with a slight sense of foreboding. Danny Iwas arrives at a hotel reception to check in, his right hand handcuffed to a steel briefcase. There’s some flirty banter in exaggerated Southern US accents before Violet, another hotel guest, arrives and starts breastfeeding her newborn in the lobby. Both women vie for Iwas’ attention even after he states that the briefcase contains his deceased mother. All three have their own agendas and desires as events spiral out of their control.

There’s sly wrongfooting even before the metaphorical curtain rises on this on the all-red set. Susie Wang is not the name of the person behind this but the collective title of writer and director Trine Falch, composer and sound designer Martin Langlie, actor Mona Solhaug and set designer Bo Krister Wallstrøm. Burnt Toast debuted in 2020 and is the culmination of a trilogy which began with The Hum (2017) and Mummy Brown (2018). Where once they sought to portray everything in an authentic fashion, the Norwegian company now chooses to focus on what they call “the theatrical un-real”.

If that’s their mission statement, then they should consider Burnt Toast to be a mission accomplished. The descent to remarkable depths of depravity is evenly paced, every jolt further down barely signalled before it happens. Body parts are sliced open or lost, blood is sprayed around and fluids are sucked from unusual places. There’s the occasional jump scare, usually from the twin lifts open, close and malfunction. There are also, though, timely slivers of humour from the conversations when other residents in dressing gowns wander in to avail themselves of a free massage or the complimentary eggnog cocktails pre-prepared and hidden behind the receptionist’s desk.

Langlie’s immersive sound design amplifies to uncomfortable levels the tap-tap-tap of long nails hitting a keyboard alongside the squelchy sounds of chewing gum. Nails down a blackboard would be preferable to how he recreates the sound of a recent and bloody wound being reopened once more. Although there’s no explicit mention or sign of Satan, the faded red colouring which pervades Wallstrøm’s set and Langlie’s atmospheric crescendos implicitly point to this all being set in a kitsch version of Hell.

Falch’s script and direction work hand-in-hand to build up the tension and draw us in. Unusual pronouncements are interspersed between equally unusual actions. Iwas casually wonders if the baby is a virgin before insisting Violet breastfeeds her in front of him; later, he declares that he never ingests anything from outside the body then casually inserts a tube into his suitcase and sucks away heartily. 

This supremely surreal affair has some obvious references scattered within. The setup starts off with a Beckettian vibe, a sense that these Estragons and Vladimirs are passing time with banal conversations as they await a resolution that is just out of reach. Some scenes recall Kane’s innate ability to go from dim light to vantablack in the space of a few minutes, not once but over and over. 

Moreover, the whole thing is drenched in Lynch; like him, Wang make the ordinary seem strange and the strange ordinary. The deep love of Cronenburg’s flavour of body-horror becomes more evident as the story progresses. It is occasionally achingly King too, with its nods to The Shining’s Overlook Hotel, and the precise nature of Kubrick’s direction is reflected in Falch’s beautifully paced world building. Would I have been surprised to see The Eagles at some point trying and failing to check out? I would not. 

There are points where Burnt Toast could reasonably be accused of shock for shock’s sake but, then again, how many other plays finish with audiences cheering on a small black box as it slowly powers its own way up a ramp? Susie Wang have set out their stall clearly from the off and, rather than focussing on the traditional dramatic concepts that preoccupy critics and scholars, they go all out to create a surprisingly layered work that will linger long in the memory. It may not be for the faint-hearted or those thinking of eating in the near future but there’s no doubting the sheer power here.

Burnt Toast continues at Battersea Arts Centre until 23 April