Haunting Julia

Synopsis

Julia was a musical prodigy - Little Miss Mozart they called her - with the world at her feet. Until her body was found lying in a pool of blood. Twelve years have passed and Joe, her father, has never stopped asking why. Did she really take her own life? Or was someone else with her on that fateful night? Strange sounds and signs have begun to haunt the shrine Joe has built to his lost daughter. Tonight he wants an answer...and he will get it..

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 31 May 2011

Alan Ayckbourn’s Haunting Julia starts innocently enough. A dead student’s attic apartment, converted into a shrine to her memory, is visited by the boyfriend, now married to someone else, who fell in love with her in a lecture hall.

Julia, from Otley, West Yorkshire, was a child prodigy, a musician known as Little Miss Mozart, who died twelve years ago. Was it suicide? Was it murder? Was her talent too much to live with, too much to share with those closest to her?

This may not be among the best of Ayckbourn’s plays – it premiered in Scarborough in 1994, was revived there in 1999 and arrives in Hammersmith in a production first seen last year at the Garrick Theatre, Lichfield – but it’s certainly one of his oddest.

There’s a very long Ibsenite exposition in which the boyfriend, Andy (Dominic Hecht), is apprised by Julia’s father, Joe (Christopher Timothy), an industrial entrepreneur, ...

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Latest User Review

Ken Hunt - 10 July 2011:

on reflection, perhaps my previous comments are unfairly harsh and need putting in context. The actors were all very good (quite brilliant in fact), and my comments were not aimed at them. I was just disappointed as I was expecting truly chilling theatre, and that wasnt what I saw....

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