ALAN Ayckbourn's final season as artistic director at the Stephen Joseph Theatre will end with a bump as well as a bang.

Under the banner of The Things That Go Bump, he has put together three plays about the ghosts that lurk in the dark corners of all our minds: the all-male Haunting Julia from 1994, the all-female Snake In the Grass from 2002 and the all-new Life And Beth from July 17.

Ian Hogg and Adrian McLoughlin have passed this way before, and so they are re-haunting Julia after their earlier encounter in 1994, and so too is Richard Derrington, who appeared in Ayckbourn's 1999 revival and now directs the third incarnation.

The play also returns to its original setting in the round, all the better for feeling there is no escape from the increasingly chill grip of Ayckbourn's claustrophobic drama.

Three men, a father, a lover and a medium, are each struggling to fathom why musical genius Julia Lukin died at only 19, the victim of an accident or maybe suicide, or perhaps murkier, sinister circumstances shrouded in drugs and alcohol.

The day the music died, so her father's life stopped in its tracks, and 12 years on and no nearer the truth, bewildered Joe Lukin (Ian Hogg) has opened the Julia Lukin Centre for Performing Studies as a tribute to "Little Miss Mozart".

His re-creation of her attic student accommodation on Pip Leckenby's compact set is a little too neat, a symbol of how this bluff, caring, devastated West Yorkshireman never fully grasped her prodigious talent.

The jolly-voiced actress, recounting Julia's life on a tape, is too perky for the truth too, but this sound is not the most significant on the recording.

Joe can make out Julia's voice, and so can her close, still bitter college friend Andy (Richard Stacey), whose reluctance to return to old ground is exacerbated by the arrival of McLoughlin's effusive, jocund psychic, Ken.

As the auditorium seems to turn ever colder, so Hogg's troubled father grows ever more haunting himself, despite his voice lacking its clarity of old, while McLoughlin is as persistent as a fly, and Stacey's Andy moves from preoccupied lack of interest to being as spooked as the audience.

As for the stage trickery at the finale, it is bloody impressive - pun intended.


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