MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
Latest editorial
Haunting Julia, Stephen Joseph Theatre
Ayckbourn chiller makes for easy seasonal listening
Haunting Julia
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
A Christmas treat from Stephen Joseph Theatre, this audio recording of Haunting Julia by Alan Ayckbourn is a simple ghost story.
Ayckbourn, an abiding favourite with audiences, voices the three male parts as well as directing a narrative in which a grieving father tries to establish why his musical-genius daughter Julia took her own life. It’s seasonal, intriguing and a potential collector’s item.
Always deeply rooted in an English middle class whose ways go largely unchallenged, his comedies are an easy escape from grim reality.
Similar stories
MARY CONWAY is spellbound by superb performances in Arthur Miller’s study of the social and personal stress brought about by Nazi Germany’s Kristallnacht
Although this production was in rehearsal before the playwright’s death, it allows us to pay homage to his life, suggests MARY CONWAY
A ghost story by Mexican Ave Barrera, a Surrealist poetry collection by Peruvian Cesar Moro, and a manifesto-poem on women’s labour and capitalist havoc by Peruvian Valeria Roman Marroquin
MARY CONWAY revels in the Irish American language and dense melancholy of O’Neill’s last and little-known play