Chris Neville-Smith

Haunting Julia

Twelve years ago, the world was shocked by the suicide of nineteen-year-old musical genius Julia Lukin. Now Andy has returned to the newly-opened Julia Lukin Music Centre, created by Joe as a shrine to his daughter. Joe in convinced Julia is still there, and wants Ken to find out the truth. Is the ghost of Julia really in the room - or are the only ghosts in the minds of the three men?

This play will be shown June 24^th - June 30^th. Production detail will follow - first of all, however, I have to cast this.

Dates:

The dates for the audition and reading are set as follows:

• The read-through is on Tuesday 27^th February
• The audition is on Thursday 8^th March (changed from previously-announced Friday 9^th - sorry, something came up that clashed after I set the date)

Details of DDS rules on what reading and audition entail is on my casting page. As always, if you cannot make the audition date, contact me and I will arrange another time - but it must be before the proper audition date, not after, so please give me as much notice as possible.

One slight change from normal is that for this read, I won't do the usual assignment of male parts to men and female parts to women. The cast is all-male, but anyone who wants to read a part priot to the audition is welcome to do so.

What I'm looking for:

WARNING: Minor spoilers ahead.

General: This needs a cast of three men, and all are major parts, so this means there's a MASSIVE number of lines for everyone to learn. Everyone has long lines at various points in the play, although we can get away with a bit of paraphrasing. Also, the three men are on stage almost all of the time, so everyone needs a good amount of stamina too. Finally, all three parts go through a huge range of emotions towards the end of the play. The long and short of it is that there are no easy parts in this play.

However, please don't rule yourself out just because you're a newcomer. I've always been amazed how well people I've never worked with before have taken to shows.

Ages are those written in the play. We might be able to age the play up a bit (if the twelve years since her death is increased), but there definitely needs to be a clear gap in generations between Andy and Joe.

Andy Rollinson (male, thirties): Invited to the Julia Lukin Music Centre by Julia's father because, so everyone says, he was Julia's boyfriend. In reality, that is an overstatement - a more accurate description would be unrequited admirer. Now married to another woman, he is a lot more down-to-earth than Julia's father, and thinks her should let her go. Andy is also suspicious, if not outright hostile, to any supernatural ideas that Julia might still be around - but this reason, in part, is down to his own painful memory that he wants to leave in the past.

Joe Lukin (male, sixties+): Julia's father - never over her death, and the Julia Lukin Music Centre has had set up more a shrine to his daughter than anything else. A strong theme running throughout the play is that Joe never understood music or his daughter's musical genius - something, it emerges, that undermined his relationship to Julia when she was alive. He is the eager to believe in ghosts, but only out of desperation that he may see his daughter again; other than that, he is very much in denial over the cruel realities of his daughther's death and the reason why. This is by far the most emotive of the three parts.

Ken Chase (male, fifties+): A visitor to the centre on the invitation of Joe because he claims to be a psychic. One very important thing to make clear is that I do not want a Derek Acorah behave-a-like. Instead, Ken is a mild-mannered man who keeps an open mind on whether the place is haunted and calmly explains his thoughts to Andy and Joe. He too, however, has a past with Julia that the other two men do not know about, a missing piece of the puzzle if you like.