ajhlovestheatre

WOMAN IN MIND 

by Alan Ayckbourn

directed by Michael Longhurst

Duke of York’s Theatre, London – until 28th February 2026, then Sunderland Empire 4 to 7 March 2026,  Theatre Royal, Glasgow 10 to 14 March 2026

running time: 2 hours 15 minutes including interval 

https://womaninmindplay.com/

Sheridan Smith’s acting has an emotional availability and sparky comic aplomb that resonate irresistibly with audiences, and her versatility is admirable. She seems oddly miscast though as Susan, a vicar’s wife desperately losing her grip on reality and her sanity in this revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s 1985 tragicomedy Woman In Mind. Smith delivers an endlessly watchable, occasionally moving performance, but her pert wit, doll-like features, tattoos and mop of blonde hair collectively render her too modern, too glossy and rather too young to fully convince as the mother of grown-up children (one real, one imaginary) and the spouse of Tim McMullan’s brilliantly realised, terminally pompous Gerald.

Julia McKenzie won the Evening Standard Best Actress award for her turn in the original London production, and both she and her replacement Pauline Collins had a useful homely quality that cast a melancholy shadow over the scenes depicting Susan’s fantasised idyllic existence with her impossibly glamorous imaginary family. That same perceived ‘ordinariness’ rendered Susan’s descent into erotic and hysterical abandon all the more shocking. By contrast, Smith has a brassy glamour that makes her seem altogether more at home with Sule Rimi’s flamboyantly dressed alternative husband and Safia Oakley-Green’s doting but not-real daughter, at least until things turn nasty, than she does with their infinitely more pallid real life counterparts. 

Smith does however have an extraordinary gift, used potently here, for allowing deep emotions to well up and sit momentarily on her face before being ruthlessly sucked back down into the depths of her being. When finally those feelings overwhelm her, as they do in the play’s unsettling final scene, and all reason is lost, it’s impossible not to be affected. 

Ayckbourn’s script, which begins and ends with dialogue that is total gibberish reflecting Susan’s heightened mental distress, felt daring and profound when it premiered forty years ago, but attitudes towards women’s agency and possibilities and mental wellness, have thankfully come a long way since. It’s not that Woman In Mind is a misogynistic play, despite the depiction of Susan’s utterly weird grieving sister-in-law Muriel (an admirably committed Louise Brealey), Ayckbourn is too compassionate and even-handed for that. But it does feel dated now in a way that even the last West End revival, in 2008 with an incandescent Janie Dee, didn’t.

Romesh Ranganathan makes an energetic, if slightly one-note, West End debut as a gormless GP smitten with Susan. Chris Jenks and Taylor Uttley are very good in roles (Susan’s imagined brother and estranged real life son) that are more improbable sketches than fully realised human beings, although in fairness the former is only a figment of our heroine’s imagination.

Director Michael Longhurst scored a triumph a couple of years ago with another study of a woman in mental freefall – the Broadway musical Next To Normal at the Donmar then in the West End – but that material had an urgency and emotional clarity largely missing here. Set in a realistic garden against a backdrop of trees that warp and distort as a reflection of Susan’s tortured mind (design by Soutra Gilmour with video by Andrzej Goulding), Longhurst’s staging excels at building an atmosphere of comic chaos with an underlying sense of real threat and disquiet.

Smith’s inherent likability does a lot of heavy lifting here but neither that nor Longhurst’s energised staging can disguise that Woman In Mind, for all its ambition and empathetic heart, is a bit of a slog.