Woman In Mind | ★★★☆☆ | Duke of York’s Theatre
Sheridan Smith’s stage work over the last decade has been a case of art imitating life. In 2016 she pulled out of a run of performances of Funny Girl suffering from anxiety and burnout, triggering a tabloid feeding frenzy.
Since then she has led a production of Shirley Valentine, playing a woman reckoning with her life choices as she approaches middle age. Next came Ivo van Hove’s ill-fated (and underrated) Opening Night, in which she played a singer having a full-on psychotic episode in the days leading up to the opening of a Broadway musical. Critics were divided and audiences baffled; it closed long before its run was intended to end.
Now she takes the lead in a production of Alan Ayckbourn’s 1985 play Woman In Mind, a tale about a woman reckoning with middle age… and having a mental breakdown.
Smith plays Susan, a frustrated middle-class housewife whose empty-nest syndrome has been turbo-charged by her only child joining a cult that forbids contact. She’s bored and lonely, a bit-player in a life that’s lost its meaning and direction. An accident involving a garden rake triggers a psychotic episode in which the loving, sexually gratifying, upper-class family life of her dreams begin to manifest in the form of lucid hallucinations.
It starts out as the kind of domestic comedy for which Ayckbourn is famed, the local doctor Bill (a restrained comic turn from Romesh Ranganathan) timidly tending to her as she regains consciousness at the foot of the theatre’s safety curtain. Her dashing husband Andy (Sule Rimi), clad in an outrageous pink and lilac three-piece suit, takes her in his arms and promises to nurse her back to health alongside her caddish brother and spunky teenage daughter.
This comes as a surprise to her actual husband, the dowdy local vicar Gerald (Tim McMullan), whose only passion is a work-in-progress written history of his parish.
Susan’s decline is incremental. At first she revels in her fantasy life, only too late realising she’s unable to escape, pulled out to sea by the riptide of her own suffering. In the mid-1980s, Ayckbourn’s focus on female mental health was seen as revolutionary, and while its impact has dulled a little over the decades, it still has something to say about the tribulations of middle age and our propensity to medicate rather than understand.
It’s a stylish affair, the floral scene painted on the safety curtain bathed in lurid technicolour projections when Susan enters her fantasy world, eventually taking on the psychedelic glow of an acid trip. When she’s snapped away from the tennis courts and lakes of her fictional manor back to the mundanity of a suburban garden, things are as grey and sombre as a January afternoon.
Sheridan Smith’s fictional, perfect family in Woman In Mind
It never rarely feels bleak, however. Ayckbourn’s play is peppered with jokes – most of them about Gerald’s sister’s cooking – that keep things relatively light, especially in the first half. Smith seems most comfortable in these moments of cheeky comedy, delivering flirty innuendos with a shuffle of her hips and a knowing look at the audience. But it’s in the moments of crisis that she really shines – the final, harrowing sequence is a blistering 10 minutes.
Still, I can’t quite get past the uneasy tension at the heart of the production that I’m not sure is entirely deliberate: no matter which version of reality she’s inhabiting, Smith feels like she’s in a different play to everybody else.
I never quite believed that this coiled spring of charismatic energy, with her sleeve of tattoos and her wicked smile, belongs in this world. The age gap between Susan and her husband (Smith is 44, McMullan is 63) is never mentioned but at one point Gerald alludes to the menopause, so perhaps she’s older than she appears. Is Susan’s radiance part of her psychosis? Or is her life so stultifying that her golden glow simply goes unnoticed?
In the end this production of Woman in Mind features a very good performance in a very good play, but the mismatch between the two make it feel a little less than the sum of its parts.