The Gift: Where Joy Meets Midwinter Magic

★★★★★

TOMS, just into Hove off the Western Road has conjured something extraordinary this season—The Gift, an audacious experience blending participatory theatre, communal feasting, and ritual playfulness. Playing through late December, this three-week limited run is the perfect way to end the year with colleagues, chosen family, and friends.

At its heart, The Gift centers on yearning—those whispered hopes we carry—and six archetypal guides drawn from tarot imagery: The Magician, The Fool, The Emperor, Justice, The Lover, and The Devil. These figures shepherd the evening with precision while maintaining an openness to spontaneity that feels genuinely anarchic. Draped in fun costumes and surrounded by projected forest landscapes that flicker across walls shrouded in atmospheric mist, the stylishly illuminated space pulses with anticipation. Once you've settled in, the playful provocations begin—and to share too much would spoil the magic. Come ready to be welcomed, nudged outside your comfort zone, delighted, cherished, and thoroughly engaged.

The Oracle greets arriving guests and distributes cards from a shuffled deck. The Oracle played by co-producer - Mella Faye turns hesitation into art. She transforms the first flicker of awkwardness into a quiet, expectant hum. Their improvisation is bold in its restraint—no gimmicks, just trust, timing, and a radical simplicity that feels deeply, defiantly queer. Those cards determine seating and assign you to one of several peculiar "clans"—instant communities formed from beautiful strangers. This immersive approach is nervously exhilarating as our hosts shepherd everyone into micro-societies. Each clan converges to articulate yearning— a wish! My companion benefited from a one-to-one with our table host 'The Fool', who helped fine-tune his wish—making it all the easier for people to engage warmly with fulfilling it. The enthusiastic embrace our whole table showed in completing it was genuinely moving.

The food arrives (pieomy) as generous shared platters—starting with delicious empanadas that set the tone—and there's plenty of it, all tasty. Passing dishes and eating together naturally breaks down barriers. It's communion, not just dinner. Approach with curiosity rather than expectation—that sense of the unknown pulses through. You are free to move around at will.

The performers are brilliant troublemakers who guide everyone through a choose-your-own-adventure night where the whole room becomes co-conspirators in games, rituals, and unexpected gift-giving. Think of it as a joyful middle finger to holiday capitalism—the best kind of feminine energy infused wild house party with a hundred new friends.

The Gift concerns itself with embracing existence and affection, where self-consciousness gets unwrapped and abandoned at the threshold for tailored gameplay and unbridled delight. You'll depart satiated in body, carrying home the bounty of hilarity, melody, enchantment, and beautiful bedlam.

This isn't supper and a performance. It's a calibrated alchemy of hospitality, banquet, spectacle, audience agency, and collective feeling—an increasingly rare phenomenon that genuinely unites disparate people. The Gift demands lived experience over intellectual analysis.

Queer audiences will resonate with its masterful navigation of consent and permission. These are clowns in the truest theatrical sense—skilled improvisers who read rooms with extraordinary sensitivity, creating containers where vulnerability becomes possible without coercion. There's something profoundly queer about the evening's architecture: the way it honours chosen family over blood relations, celebrates non-traditional ritual over commercial obligation, and finds the sacred in the silly. The pagan-inflected, Yuletide festival aesthetic—styled as a fantastical Frost Fair, loosely threaded through tarot symbolism—provides just enough thematic structure to create coherence while remaining gloriously porous.

This is improvisational artistry at its finest: bold yet subtle, exuberant yet controlled. The performers understand that true magic lies not in dominating a room but in opening space for collective imagination. They've crafted an evening that honours our inner child—that part of ourselves that remembers wonder before we learned shame, that knows play as a revolutionary act.

The Gift earns its name honestly. Go. Bring your people. Let yourself be surprised.

The Gift runs through December 21. Tickets available now. To book or for more info see TOM's website.