Blueberry Toast, Soho Theatre review ★★★★★

Like the odd love child of Harold Pinter and Taylor Swift, this short, startling play combines absurdism with a performative appetite for revenge.

Mary Law's Blueberry Toast takes us into a shiny kitchen somewhere in the American suburbs. Dislocated between 1950s conventions and contemporary gadgets, the slick set is home to Walt (Gareth David-Lloyd) and his wife Barb (a luminous Gala Gordon).

It's a sunny Sunday morning and the couple are discussing what to have for breakfast. Bouncy pleasantries stick in the air as the cosy hominess feels increasingly stilted. Inconsistencies and lies start subtly. Walt asks his wife to make blueberry toast, then denies any recollection and demands blueberry pancakes instead. We loop around and around in this increasingly surreal cycle of conflict and polite reconciliation, which draws on the likes of Edward Albee and Pinter.

Intermittently Barb and Walt's two children come downstairs to perform a four act play that they've created. From acts with titles such as 'Wrestling with Suburbia' to dramatic expressive dance routines set to Taylor Swift's Look What You Made Me Do, it's an increasingly mad mirror of this disquieting domestic situation.

Finally the tension gives way to crude, cartoonish Quentin Tarantino worthy violence. Depending on your personal tastes you'll cackle with laugher or battle revulsion.