Alan Ayckbourn is fond of time games, so let us project this review into the future. The year is 2081, the playwright has been dead for 50 years, but his oeuvre is kept alive by the Scarborough-based Royal Ayckbourn Company. Of the 107 extant plays (discounting the controversial late collaborations with Patrick Marber) only a dozen or so indisputable masterpieces never leave the repertory. Prominent among these is Woman in Mind.
This play will be remembered as Ayckbourn's decisive breakthrough to the dark side of his genius. Light comedy and heavyweight anguish always flirted around each other in his earlier work, but in this play Ayckbourn made the formal introduction -and from then on the pair became inseparable.
The story of Susan, a disaffected vicar's wife, begins with the old stepping-on-the-end-of-the-garden-rake gag and ends in a terrifying miasma of surreal hallucinations that mutates into a full-scale nervous breakdown. We suspect something is wrong when Susan's tennis-playing, champagne-quaffing family seem a little too good to be true. Our suspicions are confirmed when the real domestic monsters emerge from the vicarage: her insufferably pompous husband, Gerald, obsessed with his tedious pamphlet on the history of the parish, her vindictive sister-in-law Muriel, and Susan and Gerald's estranged son Rick, who has refused to speak to his parents for several years.
The action warps between Susan's fantasy family and the horrible reality, until she can no longer perceive the difference and her mental disintegration is complete. Ayckbourn suggests that the early stages of a breakdown can initially be quite comforting, as mental self-defence mechanisms hold reality at bay. But gradually the fantasies themselves grow hostile as cerebral synapses begin to snap and the hot-wiring in the brain crackles and explodes.
The play demands a central performance of Queen Lear dimensions, and finds it in a heroic piece of acting from Barbara Kirby. There's also solid support in Robert Pickavance's well-gauged production from Colin Wakefield as smug Gerald and Mary Cunningham as shrewish Muriel. From prat-fall to free-fall, Ayckbourn's garden-implement tragedy rakes up some deeply harrowing truths.
Until June 30. Box office: 01204 520661.
