About the Play:

The Farndale Murder Mystery is a full-length comedy by David McGillivray and Walter Zerlin Jr. The laughs abound as overly-ambitious and talent-challenged middle-aged ladies of a working class British village present their hysterical community theatre production of an original 1920s murder mystery where nothing turns out as planned. This farce is set in the Farndale Avenue Housing Estate Townswomen's Guild Dramatic Society.

The Farndale Murder Mystery is a wacky Agatha Christie-style whodunit and your audience witnesses a performance of that work in which everything comes apart at the seams, turning it into a farcical disaster from start to finish. Every drama group has experienced the horrors of what can go wrong on the night and the Farndale ladies are no different, with the possible exception that almost everything that could happen does. The scenery collapses, cues are missed, lines forgotten, and the sound effects take on a strange note at times, as the ladies present their ambitious evening's entertainment with the cunning whodunit, "Murder At Checkmate Manor." And just in case the audience should get bored there's a Film and Fashion Show and Murder Mystery Quiz complete with Prize. The crunch comes in the denouement when the "murderer," about to be revealed, has to rush home to bandage up an injured daughter. But Mrs. Reece, doyenne of the group, rises above the slings and arrows of outrageous dramatics to save the situation and provide the final inventive twist.

The Farndale Murder Mystery is the third of the Farndale play series and was first produced at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1980, with a cast of six. This revised version was first produced at The Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon in 1988 with a reduced cast of five.

Cast: 4 women, 1 man

About the Playwrights:

David McGillivray and Walter Zerlin Jr. (1949-2001) have written 10 Farndale plays starting in 1976 with the ladies' version of "Macbeth" for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The Farndale ladies are known and loved worldwide.