It’s clear from the very beginning of Woman in Mind that something is terribly wrong. “I love you more than words can ever say,” declares Susan’s dishy husband. But husbands never say things like that in Alan Ayckbourn plays, and they’re rarely dishy, so he must surely be a hallucination.
And so he is, along with the adoring daughter and jolly brother who inhabit a glowing world of endless summer, tennis whites and mid-morning champagne. Susan, after a clunk on the head in her garden, returns from fantasy to unglamorous suburbia, where she is a miserable vicar’s wife mired in a loveless marriage. “You’re describing somewhere I wouldn’t choose to live even in my worst nightmares!” she snaps – and that somewhere is her real life.
