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Available onlineAlan Ayckbourn plays a man looking for answers about the death of his musical prodigy daughter in an audio version of his 1994 work that keeps us guessing till the end
When Alan Ayckbourn’s one-act drama was first staged in 1994, it ruffled some feathers. This was not a comedy of middle-class manners, written in the social-realist mode for which the dramatist was known, but a ghost story about a widower’s haunting. Joe is a grieving father whose daughter, Julia, was a music prodigy – and a celebrity – before she took an overdose at the age of 19. Twelve years on, he is still questioning her death as he convenes a meeting with her former boyfriend, Andy, and a local psychic, Ken, in her old home. He insists it was not suicide, they say it was, and he is living in the past.
Ayckbourn has gone back to the play to turn it into an audio drama and also returned to his early career in acting by voicing it almost entirely by himself. It is the second play of the year in which he has acted (the first was Anno Domino) and it is again being aired online by the Stephen Joseph theatre in Scarborough. Continue reading...