Woman In Mind ★★★★

As we wave goodbye to 2025, bin the out-of-date mince pies and head into the new year with hopes and dreams for better things, audiences are offered a challenging yet funny revival of Alan Ayckbourn‘s Woman in Mind, running at the Duke of York Theatre. With the pulling power and abundant charisma of Olivier Award-winning Sheridan Smith (Legally Blonde, Funny Girl) and the comedic presence of Romesh Ranganathan, can we hope to understand this deliberately confusing play and dream that it is possible to deliver an entertaining piece of theatre around the difficult subject of mental illness? Well, this clever and disorientating production is unafraid of opening up the box marked ‘nervous breakdown’ and delivering it to us loaded with laughter, oddness and lashings of rain.

First performed 40 years ago, Alan Ayckbourn has said of this comic play that he wanted to write something darker and told through the eyes of one character alone. The story places us in the garden of the show’s central figure, Susan, where the audience is invited into her boring, loveless marriage with vicar Gerald and troubled relationship with son Rick. Starting with a traumatic incident, the opening conversation with her doctor is intentionally confusing and unintelligible. What unfolds during the first half of the play is surprisingly funny as Susan grapples with her new world of mixed reality and fantasy. The second half is altogether more alarming and unsettling as we witness Susan’s mental breaking down. Her fantasies become more sinister as her brain combines her real and imagined conversations, twisting and turning; we are left just as confused and disorientated as Susan is. It is not a particularly sensitive portrayal of a woman’s unravelling following an accident, but it does explore the alternative realities and frenzies that are possible given the ways brain injuries and mental illness were treated back in the 1980s.

Sheridan Smith immediately takes full control of Susan’s bewildering central narrative and is on the stage for the entire duration of this play. It’s a demanding role for any actor, and Smith embraces her character wholeheartedly, giving a prickly, bemused, giddy performance as she encounters real and imagined people in her garden. You cannot take your eyes off her as she lives Susan’s new reality with her uniquely expressive body language and strangely humorous emotional volatility. The audience is entirely absorbed as she brings in increasingly obsessive gestures and facial tics when her repressed feelings cascade out.

Comedian and Radio 2 hip-hop aficionado Romesh Ranganathan is making his stage acting debut as Bill Windsor, the family’s doctor. At first glance this is an interesting casting decision, but he is actually surprisingly good as the nervous klutz, awkwardly attending to his patient, and holding his own among the more seasoned performers. He brings a fumbling, uneasy energy to the part and immediately sets the tone of this production in the delivery of his opening gobbledegook.

Susan’s fantasy life is portrayed by imagined husband Andy, brother Tony and daughter Lucy. Sule Rimi (Fat Ham, Blues for an Alabama Sky) is attractively convincing as Andy. Lithe and charming as the devil, he offers a seductive companion who is the polar opposite of Gerald. Chris Jenks (Anna Karenina, Our Blood is an Ocean) as Tony and Safia Oakley-Green (Out of Darkness) as Lucy deliver their sporty performances with jolly-hockey-sticks joyfulness. They all become increasingly outlandish and malevolent as the play progresses, and Susan’s dream life exchanges sun, champagne and picnics with storms, vinegar and animalistic lusts.

Dull husband Gerald is proficiently played by television and stage stalwart Tim McMullan (Magpie Murders, Antony and Cleopatra, Twelfth Night). He is convincingly smug and pompously unconcerned about his wife, appearing more amused by his predicament than hers. He also manages to add physical humour to his boring character where and when he can, especially when he plays off his quirky onstage sister, Muriel, performed by Louise Brealey (Husbands and Sons, Constellations). Brealey personifies the deadpanning, dowdy widow trespassing on her brother’s hospitality with amusing facial expressions and a sulky demeanour. They both clearly enjoy their participation in the ending fantasy scene when Susan’s mind goes on its flight of fancy.

Director Michael Longhurst (Next to Normal, The Band’s Visit, Constellations) offers this production plenty of award-winning experience. He has shaped the cast’s performances into something coherent and less confusing to the audience than it could have been given the play’s premise and subject matter. His vision is skilfully supported by the production’s creative team. Set and costume designer Soutra Gilmour delivers a stylised country garden in two forms to mirror Susan’s mental splitting. The safety curtain doubles as the painted backdrop for Susan’s real vicarage garden and lifts to let in her hallucinations. At the back of the stage there is another backdrop fronted by the lush lawn and pampas grasses of her fantasies. This deceptively simple set is actually very clever, as it combines with the vivid lighting projections (designed by Lee Curran) on both backdrops to signal to the audience when it is in a dream sequence and then back into something resembling reality. The reality actors are wearing muted greens, browns and blues, and the fantasy actors appear in bright pinks, purples and reds. Paul Arditti‘s sound design is low-key during the first half but builds after the interval when the audience is plunged into the madness engulfing Susan, using reverberation of voices and a cacophony of surrounding noises. There is a particularly impressive thunderstorm sequence towards the end where every creative and technical skill comes together perfectly.

Weird but very watchable, Woman In Mind is a satisfyingly surreal New Year’s dip into the unfathomable waters of familial and mental untethering.