Woman in Mind West End review – Sheridan Smith gives a strong turn in an outdated tragicomedy

If the women’s liberation movement, as it was then quaintly known, began in the 1960s, making its slow and valuable institutional gains, it still hadn’t had much effect on most women’s lives by the 1980s. A trio of plays, by male writers, each in their different ways, began to turn society’s slow focus onto women’s mental health: David Hare’s Plenty (1978) reflected the impact of the war on a woman who found and lost freedom; Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine (1986) turned a Liverpool housewife’s boredom into a supreme comic monologue of liberation.

And in 1985, Alan Ayckbourn wrote Woman in Mind, his own unique blend of comedy and tragedy, a play told through the eyes of a woman in the midst of a nervous breakdown, stifled by her life. Sheridan Smith, having already played a magnificent Shirley, now turns her attention to Susan, first seen lying on the ground, having knocked herself out on a garden rake.

As the solicitous doctor Bill (comedian Romesh Ranganathan, making a belated and appealing stage debut) calls an ambulance, Susan slips into another dimension, where a loving family emerges to surround her with love and approval. There’s her sexy husband Andy (Sule Rimi), who can hardly keep his hands off her, and affectionate daughter Lucy (Safia Oakley-Green) and dashing brother Tony (Chris Jenks).

In Michael Longhurst’s production, the characters slip into view by bending under the floral-covered safety curtain. They are clearly not real. But the point of Ayckbourn’s subtle, sympathetic play, is to suggest that for Susan they provide a vital means of escape from her trivial daily round, where her vicar husband Gerald (Tim McMullan) is patronising and distant, her son (Taylor Uttley) is so estranged he has joined a cult which means he cannot speak to his parents, and her ghastly sister-in-law Muriel (a wonderfully grumpy Louise Brealey) has moved in.

Longhurst and designer Soutra Gilmour cleverly contrast the worlds; the imagined family are dressed in outrageous, bright costumes, while the real favour around in woollens and browns. The garden where the action is set comes to warm life under Lee Curran’s lighting whenever Susan is in her fantasy. It becomes dark and rain-filled as the action progresses, while Andrzej Goulding’s video designs blur, alter and distort, suggesting various stages of her mental state.

It’s a brilliantly conceived idea, and often very funny. The joke about Muriel’s inedible cooking – “There was talk of a dessert and I am afraid I lost my nerve,” says Bill, explaining his sudden absence – becomes a symbol of the lumpy, unedifying nature of the life in which Susan is trapped, where she no longer loves her husband and the best he can manage in return is “I’m still reasonably fond of you.” Ayckbourn’s writing straddles the line between light laughter and domestic trauma with considerable finesse, but the second act darkens as Susan’s desperation rises and even her other life no longer provides the escape she longs for.

The problem with the play 40 years on is that, although its truths are universal, its characters are very much of its time. It’s slightly hard to believe that any vicar could be quite as uncaring and insensitive as Gerald (though McMullan has a lovely moment when he nearly strokes Susan’s shoulder), any sister-in-law as insane as the easily agitated Muriel, or any doctor as incompetent as Bill.

And the part of Rick, the son, who is so ashamed of his family that he won’t even introduce them to his bride, is underwritten and unconvincing.

In the artificiality of this context, Smith’s Susan seems too contemporary and knowing. A woman as sparky and smart as her Susan would dream bigger than of perfect weddings and domestic fulfilment; at the very least, she’d be volunteering at the Food Bank.

She is infinitely moving, her little gestures and movements of discontent convincing, her face a constant reflection of her shifting moods of disappointment, anger and sadness, utterly convincing as both her worlds spin out of control. It’s a lovely, naturalistic performance, but it exposes the artificiality of the play.