In a hotel room on December 7, 1980, Mark Chapman opens The Catcher In The Rye and reads as JD Salinger’s hero, Holden Caulfiled, brings an escort to his hotel room… to talk. Chapman picks up the phone and does the same. Twenty-four hours later, John Lennon is dead.

The story of Chapman and Lennon has been told many times, but no one knows what took place in that New York hotel room on Chapman’s last night of anonymity. Step forward Richard Hurford, who invites you to enter Chapman’s room and for the first time approach those final hours through fresh eyes in Catcher, Before Chapman Shot Lennon, his new play for York company Pilot Theatre.

One story has never been told: who was the woman who visited Chapman? In Catcher she finally comes forward and the story of Lennon, Caulfiled and Chapman is remixed, relived and re-imagined as Hurford explores the fatal attraction of fame and obsession.

Are you taking liberties, Richard, making up a story about a woman who slipped away in the night, never to re-surface?

“I don’t think so because, number one, it’s made very clear it’s fictionalised. We’re laying our cards on the table, it’s fictitious, but Mark Chapman and John Lennon’s death is part of our cultural fabric, so I feel perfectly justified in using the story and exploring it creatively,” he says.

“Fame and obsession is one of the things the play deals with: if any of us put ourselves in the public eye, we have to accept that we do give up something of the ownership of our own lives. That’s not comfortable and it’s something that’s endlessly debated in the media, but I know that when you make yourself public, you only have yourself to blame. You’re saying. ‘OK, I’m part of the public debate’.”

Yes, but the mystery woman did not seek any retrospective limelight after Chapman’s deeds. “That’s really what the play’s dealing with: why she might have done what she did and what her feelings about the whole event might have been,” says Richard.

“There’s also the notion that she didn’t choose to be involved. She was just there by accident and of course I’m dragging her there again, but it’s a hall of mirrors in that celebrity/fame does not only affect those who choose it but also has a ripple effect for all of us, and she, for me, is all of us in this play – and she does come back to tell us why she did what she did for a very specific reason.”

• Pilot Theatre presents Catcher, Before Chapman Shot Lennon, in The Studio, York Theatre Royal, from Thursday until June 5. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk