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Haunting Julia by (Robin Thornber)
"Alan Ayckbourn's new play is unlike anything he's done before. It's a ghost
story. It's a chiller. And it runs for 110 minutes without an interval. It's
still very funny - and gently but disturbingly profound.
Here's this girl, a musical infant prodigy who was composing at the age of
three and the tabloids called Little Miss Mozart. She died of an overdose,
12 years ago, while still a student. And her uncomprehending father, who's
built a heritage museum around her bed-sit, wants to know why.
So he invites her ex-boyfriend and a psychic to visit her room and hear the
commentary tapes which he believes have recorded her voice from beyond. The
boyfriend is sceptical; the psychic is excited.
Ayckbourn just keeps on breaking all the rules. After Communicating Doors,
where he postulated a time-warp that has to be true, he now gives us a ghost
who has to be real. Unfinished business, he suggests, has to be dealt with.
And he does it so convincingly that Julia's presence dominates a stage with
only three male actors. You feel her anguish as "a freak wrapped in
cotton-wool", which is how most gifted children, over-protected by their
pushy parents, must feel. There's a confessional element here.
Genius is hard to live with because when your head's full of ideas it's
awkward: you can't give or accept the sort of love that helps the rest of us
get by. And a father who dominates doesn't help.
Ayckbourn's production at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in the Round in
Scarborough has wickedly knowing performances from Ian Hogg as the father,
Damien Goodwin as the boyfriend and Adrian McLoughlin as the psychic, and a
couple of superb theatrical strokes which make it as exciting as The
Woman In Black.
Jan Bee Brown's setting evokes both the student world and its plastic
recreation and springs genuine surprises beautifully. The psychology of dead
Julia's relationship with her self-made father is unnerving.
For a play that cries out "Let your children go and be themselves"
Haunting Julia is persuasively soft-spoken. Alan Ayckbourn has defied
all the rules and done it again."
(The Guardian, April 1994)
Haunting Julia (by John Peters)
"Alan Ayckbourn's new play is
several plays in one. It is a ghost story without a ghost - though to
elaborate on that would give too much away. Julia Lukin was a musical genius
who, 12 years ago, at 19, died of an overdose in her university students'
residence. Her father Joe (Ian Hogg), a Yorkshire businessman, has built a
study centre there, dedicated to her memory. Her bedroom, where she died, is
preserved like a shrine; and Joe has brought Julia's former boyfriend Andy
(Damien Goodwin) to see it. For Joe, Julia is dead but not gone. He is
obsessed with her presence. Why did Little Miss Mozart, as the tabloids
called her, die? Is any contact possible? Enter middle-aged Ken Chase
(Adrian McLoughlin), who is psychic. Or is he? From behind a door, bricked
up years ago, comes the sound of a piano. This play is a follow-on to
Ayckbourn's last, Communicating Doors: tighter, harsher, more eerie, full of
hard questions. The air is tense with mystery and unease, guilt and
suspicion. Inside the ghost story there is a play about mourning, about
letting go, about remorse which it would be destructive to identify. Were
Joe or Andy responsible for Julia's death? Further inside, there's yet
another play: one about the loneliness and emotional immaturity of the
precocious, the price such a child has to pay for being over-protected, the
trauma of crossing the threshold to adulthood. This is a haunting and
haunted play, hard and generous and very much for the living."
(The Times, April 1994)
Spectral Sonata From A Master (by Kate Bassett)
"Alan Ayckbourn: wow, what a spooky guy. His latest play, directed by
himself, is a ghost story. Wildest Dreams, which dabbled with
intergalactic aliens, pales in comparison, though frankly it was pretty
anaemic in the first place.
Julia, the musical prodigy whose teenage suicide 12 years ago has remained
unexplained, never exactly materialises. However, we hear her footsteps on
the stairs and a haunting tune on a spectral piano in her student digs which
her claustrophobically protective father Joe has turned into a museum. He
now returns there with her former boyfriend Andy, who may have caused her to
kill herself.
Overall, Haunting Julia is an eerie yarn for a dark night. Humour
hovers throughout in the corner of your eye while upsetting images of
bereaved grief and guilt rise up and fade away. There are melodramatic
moments, and Julia seems to have lost some of her inventive originality in
the beyond. She records echoey laughter over the museum's press-and-listen
soundtrack. Nevertheless, Ayckbourn manages to twist a mystery out of such
clichés. We are rendered both superstitious and suspicious, not certain if
the uncanny goings-on are genuine or a theatrical set-up by Joe or Ken the
psychic.
Ayckbourn revisits themes floated in his recent works: death; time; how men
destroy women; and how women exert power over men. In spite of dealing with
the supernatural, this play feels surprisingly real. The resurfacing of
history is less complicatedly contrived than in Time of My Life with
its tables in present, past and future, and Communicating Doors where
a woman goes into a cupboard and comes out 20 years earlier. This drama does
reminisce at length about an absentee, yet the human relations seem more
fleshed out than in Wildest Dreams.
Damien Goodwin's Andy, the sceptic of the threesome concerning the spirit
world, is not totally believable himself (the part is slightly awkward) but
Ian Hogg's Joe is excellent, stockily bluff while teetering on the edge of
breakdown. Adrian McLoughlin is nerdy, likeable and electrically charged as
Ken, Ayckbourn's ghostbuster in an anorak. Still, it becomes increasingly
clear that this persona is the ESP scene's answer to priests and shrinks. He
gets Joe and Andy to talk through their trauma, and theatre starts to look
like therapy.
The play has trouble finishing itself off. The tension builds towards
Julia's arrival yet special effects are not the stage's strong point. How
scared can you be by a squirt of mist, a green gel and a wind machine? Joe's
brief chat with an invisible being is disappointing as a cathartic and
dramatic climax.
Ayckbourn's study of "Little Miss Mozart" reinvestigates territory explored
in Amadeus: the character of a genius; a composer's relationship with
a father she cannot shake off; and creativity that drives towards premature
death. This is also a play for today. It touches on the failures of
education and parenting, on media pressure and overdoses. Kurt Cobain comes
to mind. More universally Haunting Julia mourns how, in adolescence
and adulthood, we do our loves wrong."
(The Times, 26 April 1994)
Haunting Julia (by David Jeffels)
"The
indefatigable Alan Ayckbourn, still basking in the success of
Communicating Doors, which had its premiere at the
Stephen Joseph Theatre earlier this year, has penned probably one of his
most gripping works yet in Haunting Julia.
His 47th full length play, it is a masterpiece in thriller writing from a
playwright whose reputation has been built on comedy.
But here we have another dimension of Ayckbourn who exudes all the skills of
Agatha Christie as he holds his audience in the no interval story of a man's
determination to discover the truth about his daughter's death 15 years
earlier.
Set in the attic where she died, the play is a haunting experience which
sees an intriguing succession of storylines emerge as the father's obsession
gathers pace.
He has dominated his daughter's life, yet she rarely returned home to her
family when studying at university where her subject, music, proved to be
her only refuge.
She developed a close relation ship with a foster family, the college
janitor, who becomes a key figure in the web of intrigue over her death.
We never see Julia although Ayckbourn makes her presence dramatically felt
through the use of brilliant effects.
The three handed play features Ian Hogg as the father, Damien Goodwin as the
boyfriend, and Adrian McLoughlin as the janitor.
Speculation of a secret admirer, whether her death was an accident or
suicide on the night her boyfriend was to tell her he was leaving her for
someone else, are just a few of the intrigues which pepper this excellent
production which is directed by the author and forms part of the summer
season of plays at the Stephen Joseph.
Jan Bee Brown deserves special mention for the set design, and Jackie
Staines for brilliant lighting effects.
Scarborough audiences are certainly in for a treat this summer before the
play finds its way, as it surely will, into the West End."
(The Stage, April 1994)
Ayckbourn Finds A Good Haunt (by Charles Hutchinson)
"Walking through a country churchyard on Sunday, the sentiment on a
gravestone stopped me in my tracks. "One day we will understand," it read.
The man had been taken from this world at only 23.
For 12 years, Joe Lukin has been struggling with the same emotion, since his
daughter Julia, the musical genius daughter of this average, working-class
Joe, had died in a pool of blood after an overdose of pills. She was 19, and
music had been bursting out of her head, so much so that she could never see
daylight for all the notes blocking her view.
In Alan Ayckbourn's new ghost story, Joe (Ian Hogg) will go to any length
for answers. He still refuses to believe that the prodigy the tabloids
dubbed Miss Miss Mozart really committed suicide.
Her college attic room, where her music consumed her, today forms part of
the Julia Lukin Centre for
Performing Arts. It was in these damp little quarters that her life came to
its fretful, frothing end and that now, on a twee taped account of her short
life, inexplicable sobs and pained voices can be heard. Could this be Julia
giving a message from beyond the grave?
Joe thinks so, but can he convince Andy (Damien Godwin)? Now married,
teaching and living in nuclear family happiness, Andy was Julia's
lightweight boyfriend. He knows more than he has ever thought it right to
let on.
But, as always, Joe is unable to stand back. Julia's death may be haunting
him, but his overbearing presence haunted her throughout her brief,
brilliant life. Now he is doing so again, disturbing her spirit.
When he calls in Ken Chase
(Adrian McLoughlin), a mortuary attendant with a dubious line in psychic
powers, the truth emerges chink by chink, as walls, both mental and
physical, are removed amid neck-tingling but often comic tension.
This world premiere of Ayckbourn's 47th play finds him more engaged with
exploring theatrical form than character, much as he was in Communicating
Doors.
With no interval, the ghostly mood creeps up on you like a spider.
No Ayckbourn play would be complete without a technical sleight of hand.
Giving nothing away, this time it leaves the audience scratching their
heads, looking at the ceiling or examining Julia's bed for clues. However it
is achieved, it's a bloody clever trick."
(Yorkshire Evening Press, April 1994)
Haunting Julia (by Alfred Hickling)
"Take care with that teddy - it is loaded.
This is indeed the third replacement bear, the predecessors having been
filched by prying visitors to the Julia Lukin Centre for Performing Studies.
So the next thief is going to be in for a bit of a surprise, the proprietor
of the Centre, Joe Lukin, tells us.
But as we discover, Mr Lukin has something of a penchant for nailing things
down or screwing them up - including his daughter, a child prodigy composer,
in whose memory this macabre memorial has been constructed.
Half a career ago, Alan Ayckbourn became fascinated with the possibilities
of off-stage characters, such as Dick and Lottie the dreadful party guests
we "thankfully" never saw, or the hypochondriacally character
from Absent Friends who phones his contribution in.
The author's 47th play creates thrilling theatrical tension around a
character not only off stage but off this mortal coil.
Haunting Julia is a chamber quartet for three actors and a presence -
Ayckbourn's most cloistered, concentrated and intensely atmospheric piece to
date.
In Joe Lukin he has created a harrowing portrait of gnawing obsession,
brilliantly realised by the
drawn and devastated Ian Hogg - a man teetering blindly on the edge of his
wits.
Drawn into his nightmare are Julia's ex-boyfriend - enigmatically played by
Damien Goodwin - and a bizarre male suburban version of Madame Arcati,
magnificently created by Adrian McLoughlin.
Purposefully conceived on a minute scale, paradoxically this could be
Ayckbourn's most ambitious work so far."
(Yorkshire Post, April 1994)
Ayckbourn's Spirit Is Willing by (Phil Penfold)
"Alan Ayckbourn started his career in radio. For his 47th play, he returns to
it.
Haunting Julia is indisputably a script that would work perfectly in the
sound medium; the supernatural seldom works well on stage (film, with its
myriad effects, is another matter) and in close-up, as it is here in this
intimate theatre, it requires a colossal suspension of belief to achieve the
goals that Ayckbourn sets.
The thrust is of obsession and rejection, a young woman, idolised by her
father and a prodigious musical talent, has committed suicide. But why, as a
glittering career beckons, should this have happened?
At the "shrine" that he has built to her memory, gather father, ex-lover,
and a local psychic.
As the impassioned father,
Ian Hogg is beautifully wound up, wracked with tension. Damien Goodwin
looks far to young to be an early-thirty-something ex beau with a secret, and
it isn't particularly fair on him that most of his lines are
monosyllabically reactive ("really?", "are you?") but Adrian McLoughlin
walks off with the evening playing the chuckling but earnest spiritualist.
McLoughlin's timing is, perfect, changing from low-gear explanations into
high-octane bravura which is never over the top."
(Unknown publication - possibly Teletext, April 1994)
Ghost Of Himself (by Charles Spencer)
"When you have written 10 more plays than Shakespeare, I suppose you are
entitled to the occasional dud, but there are moments when it is hard to
believe that Alan Ayckbourn is the author of Haunting Julia.
This is the second play he has premiered at the Stephen Joseph Theatre,
Scarborough, in three months. Communicating Doors, still in the
repertory, is one of his most enjoyable shows in years, but Haunting
Julia, an attempt at a ghost story, is surprisingly ponderous. You have
to give Ayckbourn credit for refusing to settle into a comfortable rut, hut
this is one work he should probably have been left to languish in
the bottom drawer.
The action is set in a student bed-sit which has has become a museum
exhibit. It was here that the musical child prodigy Julia Lukin composed
many of her works, before dying at the age of 19. Her father, who has
recreated the room in what is now the Julia Lukin Centre for Performing
Studies, is still grieving for his daughter 12 years after her death. Less
plausibly, he still seems to be, in the dark about how and why she died.
Determined to establish the truth, he has arranged to meet both Julia's
former boyfriend and a psychic at the scene of her death. There is a
great deal of plodding exposition as father (Ian Hogg) and boyfriend (Damien
Goodwin) tell each other things they must both know already, and equally
contrived attempts to establish a spooky atmosphere.
I have a hunch that Ayckbourn wanted to create a truly dark work, a painful
study in loss and obsession. But in Hogg's curiously uninvolving
performance, I never came to believe in the mourning misery of the father.
Just as damagingly, the dead girl herself never comes alive in the memories
of those who loved her best. Much of the writing is flat to the point of
tedium, while the psychological speculation about Julia seems numbingly
predictable.
Ayckbourn is, however, incapable of writing a complete flop. The character
of the psychic Ken (Adrian McLoughlin) is a lovely study in suburban
platitudes and in the last 10 minutes or so, the show starts to generate
frissons of real fear, as the true nature of Julia's miserable death comes
to light and the special effects go into overdrive.
But this is a play which can't decide whether it is a serious study of
grief, guilt and the stresses facing infant prodigies or an unashamedly
exploitative flesh-creeper. It aims for both and misses."
(Daily Telegraph, 26 April 1994) |
