Setting
The entire play takes place in the Julia Lukin Music Centre, an uneasy mixture between a public music facility and shrine from Joe to his daughter. The room in question is Julia's room as a student (albeit a far more tidy version than the real Julia's room), now with a walkway installed for public viewing.
In a format used only the second time in a full-length Ayckbourn play, Haunting Julia is a 'real-time' play (Absent Friends being the first), with a single continuous scene running throughout the whole play. It was intended that the entire play would be performed without an interval in order to maximise the tension. However, an interval was inserted in certain productions due to pressure from falling bar takings.
The published script is for the proscenium, but the Stephen Joseph theatre used both this format and the round format in various productions. The version in the round originally had the problem that the door to Julia's room that flies open dramatically at the end was invisible to part of the audience. This problem was addressed in the 2008 revival by making the entrance to the room a trapdoor instead.
Read more about this topic: Haunting Julia
Famous quotes containing the word setting:
“We don’t arrive at it by standing on one leg or on the first day of our setting out—but though we may jostle one another on the way that is no reason why we should strike or trample—elbowing’s enough.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“When I consider the clouds stretched in stupendous masses across the sky, frowning with darkness or glowing with downy light, or gilded with the rays of the setting sun, like the battlements of a city in the heavens, their grandeur appears thrown away on the meanness of my employment; the drapery is altogether too rich for such poor acting. I am hardly worthy to be a suburban dweller outside those walls.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“May we two stand,
When we are dead, beyond the setting suns,
A little from other shades apart,
With mingling hair, and play upon one lute.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)