WOMAN IN MIND. To 2 May.
London.
WOMAN IN MIND
by Alan Ayckbourn.
Vaudeville Theatre To 2 May 2009.
Mon-Sat 7.45pm Mat Wed & Sat 3pm
Runs 2hr 25min One interval.
TICKETS: 0844 579 1975.
www.nimaxtheatres.com/womaninmind (booking fee by’ phone and online).
Review: Timothy Ramsden 7 February.
Fine play supercharged by its central performance.
It soon became clear, after the 1985 Scarborough premiere of this play - in which unhappily-married vicar’s wife Susan has stepped on a rake, inducing an idealised family she imagines in contrast to her humdrum husband and his family – that it marked a turning-point for Ayckbourn, prefigured only by Way Upstream. Middle-class social observation was replaced by fantasy and dark areas of human consciousness as the focus of comedies that stretched the genre’s definition.
The author’s revival, first seen last autumn in Scarborough, with Janie Dee giving Susan’s later state an animal-like fury, gave the sometimes funny but ultimately harrowing account of a breakdown renewed significance in light of Ayckbourn’s subsequent writing. And the fantasy figures’ brightly-coloured costumes, plus the grotesque manner in which their diabolic nature is finally revealed, stay shocking, even from a playwright who could always follow an hilarious climax with a dramatic chill.
Having previously shown unhappy family relationships, Ayckbourn has warned in his later plays about the dehumanising of humanity (Janie Dee first came to notice in Scarborough playing an android which acquires human feelings). Compared with Scarborough, the author’s production seems muted in London. There, in the round, Dee made Susan’s eventual recoil from her surroundings animal-like, a link to the neighbour’s dog which, unseen yet fitfully heard, helps build tension.
The feral quality remains, but becomes more consciously a stage image, given the single audience point-of-view. This has also turned Roger Glossop’s horizontal Scarborough garden set into Simon Scullion’s sloping lawn. The new angle’s fine in contrasting the real family’s precarious entry down steps with the fantasy folks’ free-moving approaches, but it restricts space and movement.
And while Stuart Fox’s vicar-husband is glutinously unperceptive, there is no longer the family attack John Branwell’s patronising heftiness brought. Still, the Scarborough performances are past, and while it’s right to record the gains there, this play has still grown with time and acquired with Janie Dee an elemental performance that reveals the primal struggle between good and various evils, and the complexity of the human mind within a play which looks more than ever major-league Ayckbourn.
Susan: Janie Dee.
Bill: Paul Kemp.
Andy: Bill Champion.
Tony: Martin Parr.
Lucy: Perdita Avery.
Gerald: Stuart Fox.
Muriel: Joanna David.
Rick: Dominic Hecht.
Director: Alan Ayckbourn.
Designer Roger Glossop/Simon Scullion.
Lighting: Mick Hughes.
Costume: Jennie Boyer.
Assistant director: Joe Douglas.
2009-02-09 16:11:45