Woman in Mind

Woman in Mind remains one of Alan Ayckbourn’s most unsettling plays, far from the frolicking West End treat you might be expecting from a cast that includes Sheridan Smith, Romesh Ranganathan and Tim McMullan. In Michael Longhurst’s bold revival at the Duke of York’s Theatre, the play emerges less as a period curiosity than as a radical portrait of mental disintegration, darting from wry social commentary to the positively surreal.

Susan lives in dull suburbia, trapped in an unhappy marriage to an infuriating vicar with a son who has left to join a cult and refuses to speak to her. She is clearly sharper and smarter than everyone around her, although written in 1984, there’s in definitely a sense of the 50’s housewife going mad from unfulfilled potential.

When the play begins, Susan is lying on the ground in her garden, disorientated by a hit on the head with a garden rake but determined not to make a fuss. It’s a slightly awkward comic scene with Ranganathan playing a concerned doctor who is speaking in garbled English much to everyone’s confusion as we’re yet to understand that we are hearing him through Susan’s spinning mind. Susan is entirely reasonable on the other hand, funny, brisk and tightly wound, dispensing barbed observations and determined not to make a fuss.

As the backdrop begins to lift, representing the lifting of her grip on reality, the characters in her imagination begin to appear. Susan’s hyper-real family are handsome, shiny and adoring if a little sinister. Their appearance is unsettling so early on in the play when we are still getting to grips with the tone of the piece, who is who and where we stand as an audience. Longhurst resists heavy-handed visual signposting, instead allowing scenes to bleed into one another with an almost casual disorientation. The garden setting becomes a porous mental space, at once comforting and unstable, mirroring Susan’s increasing inability to distinguish fantasy from reality.

Smith’s achievement is to chart this descent without losing the audience’s trust. Her performance never tips into melodrama; instead, she lets confusion and fear surface gradually, with a perfectly toned performance from Tim McMullan as her dour husband. When the play turns darker — as Susan’s grip on reality falters and her isolation becomes unmistakable — Smith finds a devastating simplicity as the riotous colours of her mind turn black.

What makes Woman in Mind endure is not simply its clever theatrical trickery but its compassion. Ayckbourn plays with the idea of Susan’s collapse without being afraid of uncomfortable laughter yet he is unflinching about the horror of being trapped and entirely alone as your own mind starts to falter. In an era more habituated to and yet more cautious around discussions of mental health it is fascinating to see such a fearless production.

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Photo credit: Marc Brenner