Chase me up Farndale Avenue

Chase me up Farndale Avenue s’il vous plait is part of a series of plays presented by the fictional Farndale Avenue Housing Estate Townswomen's Guild Dramatic Society. Each production takes a familiar genre or title and is performed in the ladies' unique blend of misplaced enthusiasm, inflated egos, inappropriate casting, cross dressing and very bad acting. 

Chase me up is a spoof French farce. It takes as its starting point the famous Feydeau Farces with their fast-paced comic plots of mistaken identity and attempted adultery and mixes it with The Comedy that goes wrong and The Art of Course Acting. It requires precise playing, good comic timing and well-judged overacting to emphasise the ludicrous situation and script. The star of the show, as in The Comedy that goes wrong, is the set with its wonderful door business, collapsing bed and window flat and mistimed sound effects and lighting. The Shinfield team fully embraced the chaos and madness in the plot with miscast actors who looked like they were having the fun in playing the multiple roles. 

It is a challenge for amateur societies to present performers that mock amateur theatre, deliberately misplay, obviously miscast and depends on the audience acceptance that the mistakes are called for in the script. The enthusiastic response from the Shinfield audience suggested they bought in to the whole concept and enjoyed seeing their friends and family on stage taking on the challenge.

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