Three strong actors who are all well-known on the stage and television – Duncan Preston (dinnerladies, Emmerdale, Coronation Street), Joe McFadden (Cranford, Casualty, Heartbeat) and Richard O’Callaghan (Red Dwarf, Midsomer Murders, Dalziel and Pascoe) came together to deliver a tense and emotional and at times, scary, performance which is punctuated with genuine laughs.
It’s about Joe Lukin (Duncan Preston) who still misses his daughter Julia who committed suicide at the age of 19 some 12 years ago. He has even built a museum where she lived at university as a child music genius – “Little Miss Mozart”. Andy Rollinson (Joe McFadden) was her boyfriend but is now married with kids. They meet one night at the museum with Ken Chase (Richard O’Callaghan) who is supposed to be a psychic.
Preston is convincing as the doting father who still struggles to understand why his daughter took her own life, desperately seeking alternative explanations and trying to comprehend how he missed that she was so unhappy. Andy is the nervous sceptic, dismissing any thoughts that Julia may be trying to communicate with them with the constant refrain of “there must be a logical explanation”. But the play is lit by O’Callaghan’s Ken Chase who manages to tread the delicate line between believer and pragmatist. Despite the sadness of the story, he generated a steady flow of gentle and ironic laughs throughout.
We were totally drawn into the drama, and really didn’t know where the plot would take us until we arrived. The grief, guilt and loss were tangible. The staging was brilliant – particularly the powerful final scenes.
There’s an undercurrent to the story about the burden felt by those who have overprotective parents and the challenges of someone who is truly gifted and different. And it made me think, what if ghosts were kept here on earth by their loved ones who refused to let them go?
