Woman in Mind
Three/Five
Is there such a thing as too good a play? Alan Ayckbourn has certainly had a bloody good go at it. Woman in Mind is a staggering play, expertly staging a woman suffering a breakdown brought on by a blow to the head and a calamitous personal life. We watch her lose control of her own subconscious and her day-to-day life, while the play gets on with being bitingly funny. And he also manages to make the internal...external.
Is this a problem for a director? Well yes and no. It is always nice not to have to worry about the lines you are trying to bring to life. Characters that have a range of acting possibilities help too. But it is daunting in that it faces you with a big question - 'what can you bring to this play?'. Eleanor Kiff decides on stage and lights (the second in collaboration with Sam Hunt, lighting designer). She brings to life the Rose Garden in Susan's mind with giant, over-sized flowers and empty flowerpots dotted about and the lights change every time Susan's mind shifts from conscious to sub-conscious.
The problem is that these two (for ease, let's call them) "big ideas" are potentially the weakest things about this play. Firstly, Ayckbourn didn't write a play about a subconscious in which, 20 minutes in, it wasn't painfully clear who is real and who is not. Aside from the pain it causes on the eyes every time the lights change so brutally, it patronises an audience in suggesting that we might not be able to read the play well enough to understand.
Secondly, the flowers are a lovely idea, they look great, and you sense that the wooden gate is hinting subtly to something. The problem is that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't work out what it was hinting towards. Was it the gate to subconscious? Well no, because characters haphazardly entered through there, no pattern really emerging. Or maybe it did because the gates were opened and shut a couple of times. But it didn't feel thought through, it felt random rather than by design.
The basic plot is that an unhappy woman, Susan, hits her head and begins to imagine her life in a better way. Almost everything is the opposite - she has a daughter, instead of a disappointing son; she has a brother, rather than a sister-in-law and so on. Bill Windsor, a clumsy doctor, is the only person who tries to understand these hallucinations and in between this, Susan's son returns home from his time away in a cult and she questions her marriage to Gerald.
There are some good elements to the production that really help with the evening moving along nicely. As ever, the characters are well written but it is easy to fumble around the jokes in this play and not really hit any punchlines: no problem in this production. The characters' arcs are mapped out and everybody knows their roles. You completely understand Susan's (Clare Duffy) frustration with Lucy (Leigh Douglas) as she becomes shriller and meaner throughout the second Act. Gerald's (Will Heyes) reaction to his deteriorating relationship is funny for 90% of the time and for the other 10, purposefully sad as we are reminded of the reality of the revelations in the play. My personal favourite was Muriel, handled superbly by Vanessa Ostick, walking a tightrope line between cartoon and plausibility, bringing life to every scene she walked into.
The other staging, a couple of chairs and some dangerously wobbly tables, is simple and gives the actors a base that stops the play being static. The sound is subtle, giving us both Susan's subconscious hearing and the sounds of reality. There are also some genuinely brilliant scenes. Watching Bill (David Bolwell) talk to Susan's imaginary daughter, Lucy, who he imagines to be 5 years old, when in reality she is 20-odd, is genius and is handled brilliantly. The same can be said of the scene in which Muriel interrupts Gerald and Susan's discussion of their sex life and provides a range of reactions to their bickering.
An interesting offering nonetheless, this is a solid production from Drama Soc but it lacks the flair that is needed to really take it from being a good staging of an Ayckbourn to a brilliant production.
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