Death and the maiden.
Written in 1994, Alan Ayckbourn’s play focuses on the aftermath of the death of a teenage musical prodigy. In the twelve year’s since her death, the girl’s father, Joe, has established the Julia Lukin Centre, a kind of shrine which incorporates the attic room in which she died. When, however, he gathers there with Andy, Julia’s former boyfriend, and Ken, who claims to have psychic abilities, they hear piano playing and crying. Is this Julia’s spirit trying to speak from beyond the grave?
The three principal characters all approach this from different angles and hold different views. Ken believes that anything is possible, while Andy zealously opposes any supernatural explanation for what is happening; Joe seeks a rational answer, and yet significantly rejects the most obvious one. As the play proceeds, it becomes clear that each person’s stance derives not only from their general belief system, but also from their individual relationship with Julia: Andy may be a sceptic anyway, but his rejection of any mystical explanation derives less from logic than fear, given the indirect part that he played in what he believes was a suicide.
Ken, it transpires, also knew Julia, and although he clearly believes in the supernatural, his approach derives from his understanding of her needs in life. Joe, on the other hand, is searching for any explanation that will contradict what deep down he must already know: that his stifling approach to fatherhood was the main cause of her death.
If the protagonists’ differing attitudes are crucial to the drama, no less important is the way in which it is physically played out on the stage. The set consists of Julia’s bedroom as it was – or how Joe would like to believe it was – when she inhabited it, but the left hand wall has been cut away to break into the building next door that now forms the centre, and visitors view one area from the other. This creates an emotive physical space, both a public arena and a conduit of memory.
Ayckbourn injects much humour into his writing in order to counterbalance, or perhaps give greater weight to, the potent set-up; Andrew Hall’s production uses an effective array of lighting and sound effects to create what is at times a deeply chilling experience. Christopher Timothy utterly convinces as the working class father who idolised and stifled his talented daughter while Dominic Hecht, as Andy, captures the mental inflexibility of one who is reluctant to revisit such emotionally uncomfortable places. The most intriguing performance is given by Richard O’Callaghan, who plays Ken; with his floppy hair and soft, lisping voice, he is offbeat in demeanour, but this paradoxically makes him all the more interesting as a character, whether or not you countenance his claims to have psychic powers.
Though it employs some of the tropes of the ghost story, Ayckbourn’s play relies most strongly on the element of mystery inherent in the story, but once the final explanation for Julia’s death is revealed it feels disappointingly two-dimensional given all that has gone before. That said Haunting Julia remains an effective study in perception and how a vast range of interpretations of a person can exist simultaneously. None of these may be accurate, but that does not prevent each from helping to shape that person’s existence.
