10 Reasons to See Woman in Mind at the Duke of York’s Theatre

It’s got Sheridan Smith in it, and who wouldn’t want to see the Funny Girl and Shirley Valentine actor live on stage? True, even the multi-talented Smith—playing a star with mental health problems-- couldn’t single-handedly rescue Ivo Van Hove’s misconceived Opening Night, but she should have better luck as the lead in Michael Longhurst’s revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s 1985 play. She plays Susan, a genuinely desperate housewife who is losing her mind. So maybe there is something of a theme developing. Also, it is close to home because Smith herself had a well-published mental health crisis while appearing in Funny Girl.

It has a clever conceit. When Susan hits her head on a garden rake, she hallucinates a loving husband, a caring daughter, a supportive brother and a lovely home complete with tennis courts. But her reality is infinitely more dreary. She is in a loveless union with Gerald, a smug, dull vicar, and her only son has run off to Hemel Hempstead to join a cult which forbids interaction with families.  The gap between fantasy and reality provides both comedy and heartbreak.

It was Ayckbourn’s 32nd produced play—he’s since written a further 59 that have been staged, so he can’t be accused of being a slacker. He actually puts the prolific James Graham to shame. Even Shakespeare only managed 39, and some of those were co-written. Mind you, he started young when he was just 10. His long-time formula was to think about a play for a year, then write it very quickly, often in around a week.

Romesh Ranganathan will play Susan's doctor, Bill, in Woman in Mind.

It’s an interesting play in his playwrighting trajectory because prior to Woman in Mind, Ayckbourn was frequently dismissed as a popular but lightweight chronicler of Home Counties foibles. But Woman in Mind is a far darker comedy, very funny for sure in a sharp production (which former Donmar artistic director Michael Longhurst should supply), but with an underlying bleakness.

Its influences were Ayckbourn’s own mother’s breakdown in the 1950s and Oliver Sacks’ seminal case studies, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. In 1985 mental illness was still a pretty taboo subject, but times have changed, so it will be interesting how it stands up now.

It does something unusual in theatre in that the action is entirely seen from Susan’s perspective, which, because she is suffering from a mental health crisis in which she can no longer distinguish between fantasy and reality to some degree, makes her an unreliable narrator from the audience’s point of view. She leads us up the garden path. Best to just go with the flow, and all becomes clear.

Romesh Ranganathan plays her doctor, Bill, who is something of a bridge between Susan’s two polar opposite worlds. Perhaps not surprisingly, the play has been compared to Antony Neilson’s play about mental disintegration, The Wonderful World of Dissocia.

Sheridan Smith will play lead character, Susan, in Woman in Mind.

Because of that first-person narrative approach, it is a mountain of a role, but one which Smith should climb as eagerly as some of her predecessors, including Julia Mackenzie, Janie Dee, and, in the US, Stockard Channing. As Ayckbourn himself said in an interview, "It's a first-person play – meaning that the story should be seen through her eyes, and we are her. And as she goes crazy, we go crazy.”

It features an omelette flavoured with Earl Grey tea, surely a theatrical delicacy to rival the pilchard curry in Abigail’s Party and that pie in Titus Andronicus in which the latter feeds his enemy her own sons.

Reviewing Woman in Mind, the critic Michael Billington caused a bit of a stir when he described Ayckbourn as “our leading feminist dramatist”. Not surprisingly, there was outrage from many women playwrights, and quite right too. But Billington’s clumsiness of phrasing distracted from the fact that Ayckbourn has a genuine sympathy for women and, unlike many of his contemporaries, has written them with real delicacy. Woman in Mind is the play which triumphantly demonstrates it.

Cover photo from Woman in Mind, playing at the Duke of York's Theatre from Tue 9 Dec 2025 to Sat 28 Feb 2026. Book your tickets on our website or app.