Alan Ayckbourn’s 1985 play “Woman in Mind” is one of this most prolific of playwright’s very best, said Claire Allfree in The Telegraph – a “form-bending exploration of psychiatric breakdown” that mixes his “particular blend of suburban comic pathos with a febrile dash of horror”. In Michael Longhurst’s “triumphant revival”, Sheridan Smith takes the lead role of Susan, a housewife who, after being hit on the head by a garden rake (“very Ayckbourn”), starts to hallucinate about a second family – one that is loving and wealthy, in contrast to her crushingly dull and cheerless one.
Unlike many of Ayckbourn’s plays – this was his 32nd, and he has written some 60 since – this “convoluted but bitterly funny farce” still feels “fresh”, said Robert Gore-Langton in The Mail on Sunday. The comic contrast between Susan’s two worlds is “thoroughly milked”. She thinks she’s sipping champagne; in reality, it’s cooking sherry. And by the end, Ayckbourn has embraced full experimental mode, “ramping up the weirdness” as even Susan’s fantasy family turns on her. It’s “brilliant” writing, performed here by a terrific cast, said Clive Davis in The Times. The playwright takes us inside a mind that is flitting from “one hallucination to another, yet the dialogue is delivered with a lightness of touch that generates nearly as many laughs as a well-crafted sitcom”.
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