A brand new audio recording of Alan Ayckbourn’s classic 1994 play Haunting Julia, voiced by the author himself, is being made available via the Stephen Joseph Theatre from next week.

Ayckbourn will play all three parts in the play, which takes place 12 years after the suicide of musical prodigy, Julia Lukin. Her father Joe, still struggling with her death, meets with a psychic and her boyfriend to seek out the truth. But some questions are better left unanswered…

Ayckbourn said: “Over the years I have always enjoyed creating offstage characters almost as much as onstage ones. They serve to provide, at their simplest, a depth and perspective to an overall stage picture. 

“I consider Julia Lukin to be among the most complex and intriguing of my characters never physically to appear. Although a male three-hander, the play definitely belongs to her.”

This project comes off the back of a hugely successful audio recording earlier in the year, when the writer and his wife, actor Heather Stoney, performed a new play of his, Anno Domino.

Haunting Julia can be heard via the SJT website from 1 December to 5 January here.