WOMAN IN MIND | THEATRE ROYAL, GLASGOW
★★★★
“Sheridan Smith brings a mercurial fragility to her role…”
Heartbreaking and hilarious, Woman In Mind, Alan Ayckbourn’s study of a woman on the edge, is a timeless piece of theatre that speaks as forcefully to audiences today as it did when it premiered in 1985.
Susan’s life is fragmenting. Now that her son has moved out of the family home and any love she had for her minister husband, Gerald, long reduced to a grudging fondness, she is struggling to discover who she is and what purpose she serves. After a knock to the head leaves her out cold, she awakens to new possibilities and a ‘new’ family. Splitting her time between the two, it’s not long before the real world and her fantasy life begin to merge… which will she choose? Indeed, can she choose?
Played out on Soutra Gilmour’s shimmering botanical set, complete with its very own ‘Safety Curtain’ from behind which Susan’s self-serving fantasy world slowly bleeds into reality, this production is like a textured watercolour that has been magically brought to life.
Couched in the middle class platitudes of the time, Ayckbourn’s beautifully crafted words are brought sparklingly to life by a fine ensemble cast lead by Sheridan Smith and Romesh Ranganathan as Susan and her locum, Dr Bill Windsor. Smith brings a mercurial fragility to her role. At times difficult to watch as Susan’s delicate hold of reality becomes ever more brittle, it’s a witty, ballsy, natural performance that only serves to make her character’s decline all the more disturbing.
Ranganathan, meanwhile, is a revelation as the concerned, accident prone doctor. It’s a supremely funny, compassionate performance and together, the pair are comedy gold, sharing an instinctive chemistry and timing that is second to none.
Tim McMullan and Louise Brealey too put in strong shifts. As Gerald, McMullan is the epitome of the painfully polite inhabitants of Middle England, a place where small talk and platitudes are plenty… without anything of any consequence ever being uttered. Brealey as sister in law, Louise, is all nervous energy and neurosis in a heightened performance that ratchets up the farce as the climax of the play approaches.
Michael Longhurst’s direction captures the feminist nature of Ayckbourn’s intent in a mostly masterful display of pacing and nuance, only faltering momentarily as the piece reaches a rushed and somewhat discombobulating denouement, before returning to form for a devastating final moment with Sheridan’s Susan, a dark moment that will live long in the memory.
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