Woman in Mind review: Sheridan Smith sparkles in Alan Ayckbourn’s dark comedy ★★★★★

I remember well Sheridan Smith’s Hermia at the Open Air Regent’s Park production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Smith was then best known for the popular but broad sitcom Three Pints of Lager and Packet of Crisps. Now here she was bounding about the stage conveying the tragicomedy of Hermia’s condition with the ease of a seasoned Shakespearean. That was 20 years ago.

So it should come as no surprise that two decades and as many Olivier Awards later later Smith is in command of the tragedy in Alan Ayckbourn’s darkest comedy. Revived on the play’s 40th anniversary the work could so easily have fallen foul of current thinking when it comes to comedy about mental ill-health. But despite Smith flexing her funny bones to great effect there is never any doubt as to the seriousness of Susan’s condition.

From the first scene the play is set in the liminal space between Susan’s conscious and unconscious mind. If that sounds artfully overreaching for a writer who gave the world such riotous fun as The Norman Conquests, the simultaneously performed comedies House and Garden as well as Bedroom Farce, bear in mind that the cause of Susan’s concussion is the old school slapstick cliché of standing on a rake.

Not that we see it. Everything funny in this play is more of the peculiar kind than the ha-ha. And under each laugh is the deeply unfunny business of madness being the only escape from Susan’s joyless, loveless and sexless marriage to vicar Gerald (Tim McMullan). Soutra Gilmour’s design places the action in a garden bordered by tall grass from which Susan’s fantasy upper-class family appear. They consist of alpha-male husband Andy (Sule Rimi), raffish younger brother Tony (Chris Jenks) and loving daughter Lucy (Safia Oakley-Green), a sort of opposite to Susan’s real-life offspring Rick (Taylor Uttley) who has joined a Trappist sect in Hemel Hempstead and hasn’t spoken to his parents in years.