"I feel that it's a play that didn't really get an airing. It got lost in the scramble for Communicating Doors. I'd written it, funnily enough, for the new theatre [the Stephen Joseph Theatre] and the McCarthy [the end stage auditorium). I think it's an end stage play and it's a lot better as an end stage play.

"I noticed it was very popular with young people and I put it down to the fact it deals with a father / daughter relationship or a children and parent relationship. It seemed to touch a nerve."

(Scarborough Evening News, 18 October 1998)

"It's a psychological ghost story. I am more known for looking at How The Other Half Loves and all that, but they're all pretty dark plays in between. What puzzles me is how comedy and tragedy ever got separated. I believe that at one stage they belonged in bed together, and now they've just got out and wandered off in different directions, and I've just been trying to unite them. With Haunting Julia it started out as a ghost story and as I usually do I started to get rather more interested in the people. There is this little girl who by age six is writing music apparently effortlessly, and the press are nicknaming her 'Little Miss Mozart'. Her parents are very ordinary people, the father is a fencing supplier, and they simply don't know how to deal with all of this. When she finally does commit suicide at 19, the father can't handle it. He can't understand why this has happened. He is a very opinionated man and in his book has done everything right. He won't accept that and begins to look for suspects and brings in a psychic chap in order to try and contact her. It's really about parents and how to cope! In that sense I hope it touches everyone, either who's had a child or has been a child. Everyone has grievances about how their parents interfere too much in their lives or that they don't give a damn. I'm really trying to look at it from both points of view."
(Warwick Boar, 16 February 1999)

"It is an odd one. I never know quite where the idea comes from but I'd got quite interested in writing a ghost story - and, of course, The Woman in Black came out of Scarborough. I remember coming back and seeing that when I had been on a sabbatical at the National. I thought it was terrific but I didn't think I could write anything quite like it. Completely separately, as always happens with me, I had another idea which began to chime with the ghost story. I was particularly interested in writing about parents and children - the difficulty of being a parent and establishing the necessary balance of distance and closeness. Children complain that their parents smother them but as every parent knows, there's a tendency to crowd them because the more you love them, the more you crowd them. A third idea - which is always the one that really gets me going - was the nature of genius and particularly musical genius which visits children very young. I imagined a musical genius coming to a family that don't know to handle it. And with suicide, which is what this is about, what you leave very often is people who question themselves for rest of their lives over whether they could have seen it coming. They go back over every conversation, every non-conversation. It's such a terrible thing. So the father looks for another explanation... It's an unusual play for me in that it's an all-male cast. But having said that, the women in the play are very strong offstage presences"
(Birmingham Post, 27 February 1999)

Copyright: Alan Ayckbourn

Simon Murgatroyd: I’ve always felt you’ve had a soft spot for Haunting Julia, what are your thoughts on the play?

Alan Ayckbourn: It started off as a scare-‘em play but it is also about things I find very interesting: quite dark themes like the effect suicide has on the people they leave behind and how parents affect their children.

No matter how remotely connected you are to a suicide, I think you always bring it back to yourself: you wonder what you could have done, which is probably nothing at all. For Julia’s father and mother, there will always be the question: “Is there something different we could have done that would have made a difference?” I suspect the play also hints that Joe and Dolly accelerated an already existing condition.

Julia is undoubtedly a genius and the play also asks whether that sort of behaviour goes hand in hand with genius? Is genius actually a form of personality instability? I suspect that, although a lot of them stop short of suicide – or there’d be millions of dead genii lying all over the place!

Finally, it’s about the supernatural. Of all three plays this season, it’s undoubtedly the supernatural one. This element is much stronger here as, in a sense, we are taking part in a séance. We trying to triangulate an image of the girl with these three actors on stage; trying to create her first by account and then by actual concentration. I’ve said to the actors at previous productions, the greatest achievement would be for the audience to almost think they see her. Which is why there is no interval: there’s no way you can take 15 minutes from a séance to have a drink and come back and say: “Where were we? Was anybody there?”

Whether they manage to bring her back or not, I suspect, is left a little bit in the air. Do we hear Julia through Joe, because he is so obsessed and close to her?

It’s a dark journey but not without its humour. I tried to put in a sceptic, Andy the boyfriend doesn’t believe in all this rubbish and indeed there’s this wonderful line in the movie The Haunting, where the chief spook-hunter says “I hope to goodness you never do see anything, Jack, or the hinges of that closed door of a mind of yours will break open.” And Andy is probably worse affected by what happens than the others because he’s shut the door in his mind very firmly and the other two at least have left enough leeway that what’s happening is possible. Personally if I saw a ghost it’s probably finish me off altogether! I hope I’ve enough leeway in my mind that if I did see one it wouldn’t cause a complete turning around of my faith and confidence.

SM: You’ve always been fascinated by off-stage characters; arguably Julia is a very strong example of this.

AA: Julia’s a strong, strong personality. She’s one of those very sure people - or those apparently sure people - who suddenly lose all confidence.

SM: And her off-stage presence is also heightened by her music, which is again largely unheard and left to our imaginations.

AA: There was a deliberate choice of music being her discipline. Because musicians, by natural rote, by the age of five can be composing some pretty passable music. Music is a gift that comes very early and therefore it’s akin to mathematics. Music as a discipline is quite mathematical in theory. Julia lives in this completely twilight world where the rules of music are very much laid down and she explores and cuts her own path through these laws. Her emotional life is therefore severely truncated. She is a complete sociopath, unable to conduct a social relationship, let alone a sexual relationship. Her life is completely governed by her gifts, which is a baffling state not only for her but especially for her parents, particularly a simple, self-made man like Joe living in a finite life.

Interestingly the women – all off-stage - are all quite strong. Dolly, Joe’s wife, is the one who, one suspects, blames Joe entirely for the death of Julia; which is probably one of the driving factors of Joe. In a lighter vein, we hear about Pam, the airline traffic control wife of Andy who seems to go for dominant women. So there’s very strong women hovering in the background of the play.

SM: Haunting Julia was initially scheduled to open the end-stage McCarthy auditorium at the new Stephen Joseph Theatre, but instead was staged in the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round. What happened there?

AA: I remember originally thinking that I would write something for the McCarthy. I think there were two things changed:  because the McCarthy was delayed and I had also a time-span in my mind and Julia was very clear in my head and I didn’t want to delay writing it. I hate the idea of sitting on a play, deliberately not giving birth to it as it was already three dimensional in my head. And therefore I did do it in Westwood [the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round] in the round.

I think it’s interesting: I thought, it’s in the round but isn’t – more three-sided; so then I put the record straight by doing it again in the McCarthy [in 1999] where it was written for, where I think it worked slightly better.  But then with the schema for 2008 upon me, I thought: “Oh damn, I’ve got an end-stage show and two round plays.” I thought we can probably do Julia in the round, and then I thought laterally and about coming up into the room through the floor; through a trapdoor. We’ve all seen student digs. So it occurred to me it might be quite scary if Julia was below and of course the floor is the focal point of the round - and I hope this will work - so we’re all focused on the floor and then this trap flies open….

AA: You mentioned the original production: the staging did pose problems as a substantial part of the audience couldn’t see the door as it was in a vom. Did you think it was a problem?

AA: Yes, but it did benefit from – no reflection on the second one – having Ian Hogg, who was extraordinary.

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