Flame Proof
Flame Proof
Oran Mor, Glasgow
Mary Brennan
Being dumped when you've already bought the wedding dress is no laughing matter. It is, however, one of those brutal, gut-wrenching experiences that has a fatal attraction for writers of comedy: Flame Proof is Lesley Hart's go at finding the humour in one woman's raw, vengeful misery. Sad to say, it's really no laughing matter either. Not even when a drunk man with no trousers stumbles into the plot and stymies Lyssa's fire-brand plans to wreck her former fiance's lavish nuptials. This intruder has just seen his soon-to-be former wife among the wedding guests and plunged headlong off the wagon. Just in case there aren't enough reasons for his arrival, he's the brother of the bride.
What's missing, however, are jokes that rise beyond the pale-to-mid-blue end of the comedy spectrum and dialogue that doesn't go round in ever-decreasing circles until it reaches the over-due punch-line. We're already swallowing the unlikely gambit of the woman short-circuiting the electrics in the marquee, and the man being an electrical engineer who can spot what she's up to - some slick, nippy banter would be the ideal sauce to help the shouty, over-stretched sketch go down with a chortle.
Michele Gallacher and Billy Mack are the noble thesps who act as if they'd been given the script of a lifetime. Mack even manages to coax something sincere and ruefully decent out of the recovering alcoholic, Buddy. Gallacher, too, burrows underneath Lyssa's relentless brittle-bitching to suggest the pain that makes her behave like a caricature villain in a TV soap. Andy Gray directs proceedings at a hectic lick: to no avail - it still maunders on for almost an hour.
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