Characters
There are three male characters in the play, they are:
- Joe Lukin, Julia's father, now in his sixties, never let his daughter go, convinced there are unanswered questions about her death;
- Andy Rollinson, generally considered Julia's student boyfriend, but unrequited admirer would be a more accurate description, now in his thirties;
- Ken Chase, a gentle unassuming man in his forties who offers his service as a psychic to Joe, later discovered to have once been the janitor in Julia's house.
There are also two voice parts in the play: one of Julia (or, more accurately, an actress imitating her voice speaking words the real Julia would probably never have said), and a sombre male voice talking about her death.
It was originally intended that Joe would be the central character of the story, but Ayckbourn eventually considered the central character of the story to be Julia herself. He also considered two other offstage characters - Dolly, Joe's late wife, and Kay, the woman Andy married instead of Julia - to be strong characters.
Read more about this topic: Haunting Julia
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents; and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole spring of actions.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of human history.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)