Nigel Slater’s food-obsessed childhood, served up with love
Toast The Other Palace, London SW1 ★★★★★
‘It’s 5pm on a Friday and I’m making jam tarts with my mum.” So says the nine-year-old Nigel Slater in this stage adaptation of his bestselling memoir, distilling in a single line the complicated way food is bound up in the egg white of memory, ritual and love. Making mince pies just before Christmas, and remembering to include the secret ingredient – lard. Trips to the sweet shop with its dazzling displays of apple bonbons and liquorish torpedoes. The soft buttery crunch of toast – always white bread, never brown.
Toast – a hit at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, adapted by Henry Fillouxbennett and energetically directed by Jonnie Riordan – is both a coming-ofage story and a tale of loss. Every significant moment in young Nigel’s life is manifested in the taste and the making of food. In his parents’ Formica kitchen, he obsessively reads Marguerite Patten and wonders what Duck à l’orange might taste like.
His asthmatic mum (Lizzie Muncey), poignantly girlish in canary-yellow dress, hates cooking and leaves burnt toast crumbs in the butter. She lovingly indulges Nigel’s love for baking but points out that he doesn’t always need to follow a recipe: “We make jam tarts the way we like them.”
After her death, cooking becomes a weaponised act of attrition between Nigel and his father’s new girlfriend, a vampish cleaner “with a Pledge problem” who serves up lemon meringue pies. Sixteen-year-old Nigel retreats into solitude, eating Walnut Whips and making shame-inducing trips to a lay-by at night.
Giles Cooper invests Slater with charm, vulnerability and a winning self-aware streak, occasionally confiding with the audience as though to acknowledge that, like a recipe, a story can depart from the script, too.
Toast also tells of the coming of age of England, slowly emerging from the rationed austerity of the Fifties into a brave new world of spaghetti and sex. His father (Stephen Ventura) condemns Nigel’s emerging sexuality with references to “nancy boys”, but indulges his preference for making fruit pies over chopping logs.
There’s rather too much filling, not least in the form of some clumsy dreamlike choreographed sequences, and it would have tasted better at 90 minutes than two-and-a-half hours. But a show that gives Walnut Whips to its audience is hard not to love.