Susan is not the first woman battling inner demons in her middle years that Sheridan Smith has taken on for the West End stage. Before Alan Ayckbourn’s disconsolate housewife here, there was her superlative Shirley Valentine, navigating middle-age wobbles by setting sail for the island of her dreams, and John Cassavetes’ Myrtle, in Opening Night, more brittle and inebriated in her midlife malaise.
Susan is, like Shirley and Myrtle, in a mentally fragile state. That is partly because she has taken a knock to the head with a garden rake, which has triggered an alternate, hallucinatory world. This, at first, seems like a refuge from the emotionally deadened real life she shares with vicar-husband, Gerald (Tim McMullan), dour sister-in-law, Muriel (Louise Brealey), and rebel son, Rick (Taylor Uttley) who has refused to speak to his parents since joining a sect in Hemel Hempstead.
