Mel Giedroyc (of comedy duo Mel and Sue fame) is no stranger to Oran Mor, having trod the boards last year in Andy Gray's Classic Cuts production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
This week she makes her writing debut as part of A Play, A Pie and A Pint, with female-centric, family drama Slice.
Giedroyc teamed up with comedy chum Sue Perkins as co-host of BBC 2 cookery competition The Great British Bake Off. And the experience seems to have rubbed off, as baking plays an important part here as a group of sisters gather together for the first time in 20 years. A their mother lies in a coma dying, the Victoria sponge cake in the oven isn't the only thing that starts to rise as family tensions and grievances come to the fore.
It's an affable and entertaining enough comedy. One reminiscent of Des Dillon's Six Black Candles, with a few good one-liners and giggles along the way. Even if in the end it isn't all that dramatically filling.
A brooding brood whose lives have all taken different turns, the sisters Victoria (Lesley Hart), Charlotte (Louise Ludgate) and Madeleine (Fletcher Mathers) are unoriginal stock characters: the unfulfilled spinster, the smug domestic goddess mother of five and the eldest wild child who flew the coop all the way to LA. And on this showing Giedroyc's writing talents seem better suited to TV sitcom than the stage.
But as sibling jealousies and differing memories of their upbringing bubble away, the icing on the cake comes from the performances rather than the script, with Hart in particular in fine hangdog, OCD baking mode.
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