Richard Bean is now rightly famous as one of the UK's finest modern playwrights. Award-winning productions such as Great Britain and One Man, Two Guvnors have cemented his reputation as a dramatist whose plays are definitely worth shelling out the price of a theatre ticket for. Everyone has to start somewhere, however, so if you want to satisfy your curiosity as to his first foray into what have now become familiar themes, then you might want to catch this production on tour at the Playhouse. However don't go expecting the fast-paced, laugh-out-loud comedy of OMTG or the vicious scalpel he wielded in Great Britain – Toast is neither particularly funny nor hard-hitting.

The night shift of a Hull bread factory in the mid-1970s is the setting for this gentle examination of camaraderie and rivalry between six workmates and the destabilising influence of a new worker, student Lance. It is a period of change for the working classes – Hull's shipping industry has been decimated by the Icelandic Cod Wars and traditional factory jobs are slowly disappearing due to mechanisation and centralisation of processing. Sadly, Bean did not exploit the potential of this setting and Toast is neither an incisive examination of this period of British social history (such as William Ivory's Made in Dagenham) nor a joyous riff on repetitive shift work in a rigid hierarchy (Victoria Wood's Dinnerladies being a fine example).

The second act is stronger than the first and there are some genuinely disconcerting moments when the metaphorical hell of bread factory shift work is brought into sharp focus. Matt Sutton (Peter) and Kieran Knowles (Dezzie) are very engaging, but the rest of the actors have the misfortune of playing two-dimensional parts with some duff lines in a not-very-well-directed production. And Matthew Kelly who is a good actor (last in Oxford as a brilliantly charismatic head teacher in To Sir With Love) is just wasted in this role. Most of the cast have been with this production a long time, and maybe the initial rise they achieved when the play was in the proving stage has been bashed out by over-kneading. Overall this is a tired production whose script which has some good moments, but not enough to sustain two hours in the theatre.

It is a sign that a play simply isn't engrossing enough when audience members (alright, my companion and I) get sufficiently cross about the wrong way to use a public payphone (you are supposed to wait for the pips, then insert the coin with a satisfying clunk!) that they whisper about it during the performance. A large clock in a prominent position centre stage appeared to be moving in real time in the first act and only served as reminder of how slow the pace was.

The hashtags #OscarsSoWhite and #BaftaBlackout have focused public attention on diversity in the entertainment industry. It seems strange that in this day and age when fifty percent of the acting profession is female and a representative percentage is black, Toast (cast - seven white men) has been revived at all, never mind that it isn't a particular good play.