BWW Reviews: HAUNTING JULIA, Riverside Studios, June 1 2011

Haunting Julia - the clue is in the title.

Sir Alan Ayckbourn's 1994 play is revived at the Riverside Studios and it's a ghost story, albeit one without the traditional "Scooby Doo" style setting of an dark old house, cobwebby and creaking (though fans of the annoying dog will be pleased to see a janitor in a key role). Unscoobyishly, the action takes place in a modern Visitor Centre (and not a rundown museum dedicated to clown masks), which faithfully reconstructs the bedroom of Julia, "Little Miss Mozart", dead now twelve years, an apparent suicide at the age of 19. Her father Joe (Christopher Timothy, just stopping short of assuming the persona of one of Monty Python's "Four Yorkshiremen") refuses to accept the coroner's accidental overdose verdict and has roped in Andy (Dominic Hecht) to listen to some eerie laughter that has started to appear on the tapes played for the benefit of daytrippers. With Andy sceptical of any explanation outside technical jiggery-pokery and Joe so desperate to believe anything that connects him to his daughter, their oppositional two hander is just beginning to run out of steam when Ken (Richard O'Callaghan in a charismatic performance) enters claiming to feel the vibrations of Julia's presence all around the room.  

While the men are intermittently interrupted and unsettled by muffled sobbing, a bit of power outage and and old joanna carnking out old tunes downstairs, they reveal more of their relationships with Julia, each harbouring a guilty conscience, but only one deemed culpable - if another person can ever be described as culpable when an adult, even one as fragile as teenage Julia, decides to end it all. And that is theme of the play - Julia may have been dysfunctional in her treatment of friends and family, the genius unable or unwilling to display the usual social niceties, but the men who refused to leave her be - who haunted her as she was making the always difficult transition from a child to an adult - did her no favours. The clue is, after all, in the title.

Haunting Julia continues at the Riverside Studios until 3 July. 

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