Haunting Julia: In Brief
Haunting Julia
Play Number: 47World Premiere: 20 April 1994
Venue: Stephen Joseph Theatre in the Round, Scarborough
Premiere Staging: In-the-round
Published: Samuel French
Other Media: Audio play
Cast: 3m / 1f pre-recorded voice
Run Time: 1hr 50m
Synopsis: Twelve years after his daughter Julia's death, her father Joe still struggles to understand what happened to the prodigal musical genius. In the room where she died, a psychic, her boyfriend and Joe seek to find out the truth about her death, but some questions are better left unanswered.
Notes:
◦ Haunting Julia was conceived as and is intended to be performed as a one act play - it can be performed in two acts though.
◦ Although premiered in-the-round, Haunting Julia was conceived as an end-stage play and is best suited to this type of staging.
◦ It is a play set in real time - the amount of time which elapses on stage is the equivalent to that experienced by the audience.
- Haunting Julia is Alan Ayckbourn's 47th play.
- The world premiere - directed by Alan Ayckbourn - was held at the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round, Scarborough, on 20 April 1994.
- The London premiere - directed by Andrew Hall - was held at the Riverside Studios, London, on 27 May 2011.
- It is the first - and as of writing, only - play by Alan Ayckbourn to feature an all-male cast.
- A major inspiration for the play was the stage-play The Woman In Black, adapted by Stephen Mallatratt from the novel by Susan Hill. Premiered at the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round, Scarborough, The Woman In Black transferred to the West End where it has enjoyed one of the longest ever West End runs and has been produced with great success around the world.
- The play is also inspired by the classic 1963 movie The Haunting, itself adapted from. Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House. Alan was particularly interested in the idea of what if someone who resolutely did not believe in the supernatural was confronted with irrefutable evidence of the supernatural.
- Haunting Julia was conceived as an end-stage play and intended to be the first play to be performed in The McCarthy at the then under-construction Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough. However, aside from the fact construction of the venue fell behind schedule, the play was staged in-the-round at the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round when the UK Government's budget cuts for the arts left the venue with a real-term cut in funding and the need for a small-scale play which would, hopefully, both save and make money for the venue.
- It was written as a one act play to be performed in real-time (i.e. the same amount of time passes for the characters in the play as for the audience) - this being only the second real-time play written by Alan Ayckbourn after Absent Friends.
- When it was revived in 1999 at the Stephen Joseph Theatre by Alan Ayckbourn, it was produced as a two-act play - against the playwrights wishes. This was due to the fact a fall in bar takings during the original production led the Stephen Joseph Theatre to request an interval for the revival. Alan agreed but was unhappy with the result and for the 2008 revival and for the published edition it was restored to a one-act play.
- Haunting Julia is one of three supernatural plays written by Alan Ayckbourn - although it is important to note he does not consider these plays to be a trilogy. The other two plays are Snake In The Grass (1994) and Life And Beth (2008).
- The play is regarded as a companion piece to Snake In The Grass (and to an extent Life & Beth) in one of its major themes is how parents treat their children.
- Although Haunting Julia is relatively unambiguous in the nature of the haunting (the author's intentions are that Julia is a supernatural presence who manifests herself at the end of the play to Joe), the 2008 revival at the Stephen Joseph Theatre was much more ambiguous with the actor Ian Hogg believing that Julia was purely a creation of her father's Joe mind as he struggled to reconcile himself with the truth behind the death of his daughter.
- During 2020, Alan Ayckbourn recorded Haunting Julia as an audio play. He played all three male roles with Naomi Petersen playing the 'voices'. The stream was made available via the Stephen Joseph Theatre's website from 1 December 2020 to 31 January 2021.
- Contrary to what other web-sites might report, Haunting Julia is not part of a trilogy called Things That Go Bump. This is because Alan Ayckbourn has never written a trilogy called Things That Go Bump nor does he consider Haunting Julia to be part of a trilogy (although it has thematic connections to his other supernatural plays).