By Alan Ayckbourn
Directed by Anna Mackmin
Designed by Lez Brotherston
Chichester Festival Theatre
Wednesday 5th October 2022 14.30
CAST:
Jenna Russell- Susan
Will Attenborough – Rick
Matthew Cottle- Bill
Mac Elliot – Andy
Flora Higgins – Lucy
Stephanie Jacob – Muriel
Orlando James – Tony
Nigel Lindsay – Gerald
What’s the Ayckbourn obsession with numbering his plays? Even Wikipedia starts ‘(This) is the 32nd play by …’. The last one I saw was #75, Neighbourhood Watch. He is now up to Play #81, The Girl Next Door. Shakespeare only got up to #37. Or #39, depending on your source. I just looked at Fantasia 2000 which states ‘This is Disney’s 38th animated classic.‘ Then there’s the single by The Four Seasons’ Opus 17. Johann Sebastian Bach got all the way up to Opus 1128.
Ayckbourn’s #32 dates back to 1985. It’s considered one of his better plays (‘his most profound and introspective …‘ apparently). The theatre commercial conundrum is that Ayckbourn is just about the most reliable bums-on-seats writer. I recognize that, and if I were running a theatre I’d do one every year for three weeks. But Woman in Mind would not be one of them. However, the Ayckbourn appeal worked for Chichester today. It was nearly full. Matinees are Ayckbourn’s constituency.
So the play is about Susan (Jenna Russell). Susan never leaves the stage, and we never see anything that Susan doesn’t see. This is hammered home at the start. Susan has been knocked unconscious by standing on a garden rake. As she comes round the doctor (Matthew Cottle) is speaking gibberish, which is all she can hear so it’s what we hear from the doctor’s mouth. So he says ‘December bee.’ This confuses her (we in the audience work out that he must really be saying ‘Remember me.’) December Bee was the play’s sub-title.
As she comes round she sees a fantasy family – Andy, (Mac Elliot), her handsome attentive husband; Tony, her bold brother (Orlando James); her beautiful, sweet and admiring daughter, Lucy (Flora Higgins). They all look up to her and admire her. She’s living on a vast estate with tennis courts and lakes. She has been plunged right into a Mills & Boone romance.
This is where our doubts started. We remember Love on The Rocks which we saw twice at the Southampton Nuffield … they original production and then the anniversary revival. Was it the tenth or the twentieth? That’s about a Mills & Boone novelist whose imagined characters come alive. It is a better and funnier play than Woman in Mind mainly because the writer changes her mind and they have to re-do scenes to her changed ideas. In Woman in Mind’s fantasy sequences, Susan imagines herself as a writer of historical romances, just like the lead in Love on The Rocks.
Karen was irritated by what she says is Ayckbourn’s inabilty to write from a middle-aged woman’s point of view summing up her life experience, and even more by the paucity of the hackneyed fantasy.
And did you get what
Raymond Carver, Late Fragment, 1989
you wanted from this life, even so?
The fantasy breaks and she’s back with her real family, the boring Gerald, a vicar (Nigel Lindsay) and the grumpy Muriel her sister in law (Stephanie Jacob). Her son, Rick (Will Attenborough) hasn’t seen her for two years because he’s involved with a cult. He returns but still wants nothing to do with her.
Gerald and Bill have cooking Marsala from a bottle that’s been open years.
The innovative aspect of the play in 1985 was this meshing of fantasy and reality. When my oldest granddaughter was first speaking, she had a book with a picture of a ladybird. Karen put a real ladybird on her hand and she was fascinated. The living ladybird was ‘real’ while the picture was ‘toy.’ That’s the division here. In fact, the audience is never in doubt for a moment which is which; there is no puzzle, though as the play ends both worlds start to fold into each other until they’re totally confused, and Susan is revealed as mentally ill, or possibly dead as both worlds fade away. Well, everyone says she’s mentally ill. But maybe she’s just hallucinating after the knock on the head.
There are so many positives … the garden set is stunning. Chichester has always specialized in first rate fake grass and gardens. Excellent lighting and sky projection throughout. The actors are all first rate. Jenna Russell has to sustain the role full on without even a second’s break. Matthew Cottle is the accident prone bumbling local GP, Bill, in corduroy, who is also unhappily married (it seems) and has held a quiet torch for Susan for years. Perhaps the funniest scene in the play is when Bill tries to humour Susan by pretending he can see Lucy, who he imagines to be a small child, and tries to entertain her while mayhem breaks out around him.
Nigel Lindsay’s vicar, Gerald, in brown trousers and brown cardigan is mind numbingly dull, researching his 60 page history of the parish that he’s devoted years too. Stephanie Jacob is the lugubrious worst-cook-in-the-world sister-in-law, Muriel. Both are lovely comic creations.
The jolly nice family are all cardboard cut-outs, though Lucy (Flora Higgins) has the most stage time as the loving fictional daughter. Orlando James is the huntin’ and shootin’ brother and Mac Elliot is the perfect fantasy husband, Andy.
The trouble is the play. What might have been innovative in 1985 now falls into the standard Ayckbourn criticism of relying on stock characters for the real gloomy family, and over the top stereotypes for the wealthy family. In the end, it’s simply not a very good play and in spite of the innovation of a single viewpoint omnipresent lead character, and the integration of ‘real’ and ‘toy’ we thought it felt terribly dated.
In 2022, you have to credit the video designer on any production, and the cloudscapes projected at the rear were ever changing from bright day to stormy night. The programme notes how careful Ayckbourn’s stage directions are on weather via lighting and sound. Video projection is a major upward step. In a recent review I said the 2020s are all about video projection in virtually every production. The 1980s and 1990s were all about rain machines. Ayckbourn’s Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough home theatre must have had one right in the middle of the circular stage, just as here in 2022- yes, you get both video projection AND a rain machine.
Ayckbourn was fond of rain machines. The main rule about using a rain machine is that the female actor should be in a gratuitous, flimsy white slip which turns semi-transparent, just as here in 2022. Wouldn’t a plastic mac do the same job? Absolutely not. Wet T-shirt contests rule. I think rain machines are crap and cruelty to actors.
Karen specializes in one word summaries (and likes Ayckbourn less than I do): “Trite.”
Overall? I’ll go with the consensus.
***
WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
four stars
Tim Bano, The Stage ****
Gareth Carr, What’s On Stage ****
three stars
David Jays, The Guardian ***
Bold for its time, Ayckbourn’s exploration of mental illness can feel laborious, no longer theatrically startling and in Anna Mackmin’s production the distress is less lacerating, the seep between registers less surreal than they could be.
David Jays, The Guardian 30 September 2022
Nick Ferris, The Telegraph ***
Rachel Halliburton, The Times ***
Libby Purves & Friends, Theatre Cat ***
It is easy to see why director Anna Mackmin and Chichester thought it a good wheeze to revive this 1984 play: mental health is trending, as is the anxiety that the menopause might drive some women off their heads. And you can’t fault the acting, especially from Jenna Russel’s Susan at its core, and where there is comedy the cast find it. The confrontation between the judgmental, alienated son and Susan is very strong indeed, set against the marshmallow-sweetness of the imaginary daughter. Ahhh, imaginary children…
Theatre Cat 28 September 2022
ALAN AYCKBOURN ON THIS BLOG
How The Other Half Loves, Salisbury Playhouse 2023
Communicating Doors by Alan Ayckbourn, Menier Chocolate Factory, 2015
Neighbourhood Watch by Alan Ayckbourn, Stephen Joseph Company, Bath Theatre Royal, 2012
Way Upstream by Alan Ayckbourn, Salisbury Playhouse, 2011
The Norman Conquests by Alan Ayckbourn, Chichester 2017
– Living Together
– Table Manners
– Round and Round The Garden
WILL ATTENBOROUGH
Photograph 51, by Anna Ziegler, Michael Grandage Company 2015
MATTHEW COTTLE
The Deep Blue Sea, by Terence Rattigan, Chichester Minerva 2019
The Chalk Garden by Enid Bagnold, Chichester 2018
Communicating Doors by Alan Ayckbourn, Menier Chocolate Factory, 2015
Neighbourhood Watch by Alan Ayckbourn, Stephen Joseph Company, Bath Theatre Royal, 2012
Quartemaine’s Terms, by Simon Gray, TheatreRoyal, Brighton 2014
Matthew Cottle was for us, more importantly in the My Oxford English video series which we scripted.
MARC ELLIOT
Macbeth, Wanamaker, 2018
STEPHANIE JACOB
Absolute Hell by Rodney Ackland, National Theatre, 2018
Flare Path, by Terence Rattigan, Salisbury 2015
ORLANDO JAMES
The Winter’s Tale, Cheek By Jowl, 2017 (Leontes)
Tis Pity She’s A Whore, Cheek By Jowl, 2014
NIGEL LINDSAY
God of Carnage, by Yasmina Reza, Bath 2018
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