The Haunted Through Lounge and Recessed Dining Nook at Farndale Castle

Many thanks to the Fylde Coast Players for the invitation to attend their latest production of The Haunted Through Lounge and Recessed Dining Nook at Farndale Castle. This is a play within a play in which the audience watch the ladies of the Farndale Avenue Housing Estate Townswomen’s Guild Dramatic Society make a spectacle of themselves and their harassed producer, as they attempt to put on a play about a sinister plot to secure the future of Farndale Castle.

The stars of this production were the set, sound effects (both off stage and recorded) and deliberately out of sync lighting plots, all of which were operated with excellent timing throughout. Congratulations to Tim Greenwood, Rich Spilman, Mark Albion, Sue Wood and Rosemary Roe. In my opinion, the strongest performances were those from Bee Scully playing Thelma playing June, Mandy Hall playing Mrs Reece playing Lady Madge Graves and Emily Cartmell playing Jasmine playing Dr Blood & Rev Tombs, with Emily providing the most humorous moments of the evening. They had excellent stage presence and were the most secure in terms of their characterisations. Debbie Couchman playing Lottie playing Marty also gave a notable performance. The rest of the cast were fully committed to their supporting performances.

Anyone who has had the privilege of watching Mischief Theatre’s The Play That Goes Wrong will understand just how hilarious this format has the potential to be and how important it is for each actor to clearly portray two different characters; who they are as a cast member and the character their cast member is portraying. Without this clear differentiation, the audience can become confused as to ‘who’ they are watching at any given moment and struggle to follow the storyline. There were certainly times when the definition between characters was lost and some accents weren’t stable with lines spoken by one character being voiced in the other character’s accent. 

There is no doubt that the cast and crew really threw themselves into this production and worked hard to try and do the script justice. It isn’t easy to play to such a sparsely occupied house, especially with comedy, as the actors feed off energy from the audience. However, too often the action simply became farcical with what could have been quick, comedic moments being over played to try and elicit laughs and drawn out for far too long; the wrong sound effects, the suitcase joke, Lady Graves assisting Crematia to limp off stage and the extended Time Warp scene to name a few examples. There is a fine line with this style of comedy between being very funny and the humour losing its impact, tipping over into tedium. Unfortunately, this appeared to be the case with this production as evidenced by the lack of laughter and comments by audience members. I think some direction to allow the script to do the work and to assume the audience will get the joke quickly, first time wouldn’t have gone amiss.

This was a decent effort at what is a very difficult genre to perform well and the cast certainly appeared to be thoroughly enjoying themselves, which was great to see. 

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