Woman in Mind: ‘triumphant’ Alan Ayckbourn revival

Sheridan Smith (as Susan) navigates a ‘particular blend of suburban comic pathos with a febrile dash of horror’

(Image credit: Marc Brenner)

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”.

This production has many fine elements, said Andrzej Lukowski in Time Out. The “lush but menacing” garden set impresses, as does the way Susan’s two worlds are “initially, jarringly divided by a partially raised safety curtain”. Smith switches mood brilliantly and sometimes thrillingly between them. And Romesh Ranganathan makes a creditable West End debut as the doctor who lives next door. Yet in the end, I wasn’t sure what point Ayckbourn “was trying to make beyond a technical exercise”. Ultimately, this play – more artifice than heart – conveys little about loneliness, middle-aged sexuality, or even mental health. “There is something melancholic and Chekhovian at its core, but it’s deep, deep beneath the surface, obscured by an all-consuming conceptual glamour.”