Woman in Mind Revival
Closing: February 28, 2026Woman in Mind - 2025 West End History , Info & More
Duke of York's Theatre
St Martin's Ln, Charing Cross, London WC2N 4BG, United Kingdom London WC2N 4BG
The comic poet of middle class life, always so very funny, goes deeper and darker in this triumphant play about a housewife named Susan who is married to a boring cleric named George. After getting knocked out by stepping on the tooth end of a garden rake, Susan experiences hilarious hallucinations in which her oppressive and boring everyday life is replaced by a fantasy in which she is an ideal wife and mother with an ideal family. While her real family treats her with condescension and apathy, her fantasy family dresses in lovely white, always drinks champagne, lives in a stately home and tells her that she is wonderful. Eventually, the fantasy family becomes nightmarish and Susan begins to realize that she is going mad.
Woman in Mind - 2025 - West End Cast
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Sheridan Smith elevates this somewhat dated material
6 / 10
The play puts Susan through the physical and mental wringer and it works thanks to Smith. She has a uniquely vivid physical presence, and her emotions are shimmeringly close to the surface. It’s great to see her back on stage again after the unfortunate debacle of 2024’s Opening Night, where she was again required to fall apart. Maybe next time she could play a character who isn’t – to quote the Patsy Cline song played before curtain-up – Crazy.
Sheridan Smith is wonderful and Romesh Ranganathan decent, but Alan Ayckbourn’s 1985 play is more artifice than heart
6 / 10
I think my biggest problem is that with her amusingly preposterous sister in law Muriel (Louise Brealey) and son Rick (Taylor Uttley) freshly escaped from a cult, Susan’s ‘real’ life is so overegged that it’s scarcely any less ludicrous than her imagined one. And while that may possibly be the idea (although I don’t think it actually is the idea) it’s difficult to see what the play is really saying about her. She’s a middle-aged woman who has been left behind by the real world and has instead embraced one conjured by her subconscious. But it never really takes the time to slow down and properly explore loneliness, middle aged sexuality, or even mental health. There is something melancholic and Chekhovian at its core, but it’s deep, deep beneath the surface, obscured by an all consuming conceptual glamour.
by Aliya Al-Hassan - January 7, 2026
Directed by Michael Longhurst and starring Sheridan Smith as Susan and Romesh Ranganathan as Dr Bill, the show is now open at the Duke of York's Theatre. What did the critics think?
by Stephi Wild - January 6, 2026
All new production photos have been released of Sheridan Smith and Romesh Ranganathan in Alan Ayckbourn’s psychological comedy WOMAN IN MIND. Check out the photos below!
by Aliya Al-Hassan - January 7, 2026
Alan Ayckbourn’s 1985 play Woman In Mind is a darkly comic look about mental disintegration and a mid-life ennui that would have rarely been spoken about forty years ago. In the first major West End revival since 2012, director Michael Longhurst presents a startling portrait of a woman who retreats into a fantasy world as a means of coping with her lack of purpose and love in her real life.
by Stephi Wild - December 11, 2025
Production photos have been released of Sheridan Smith and Romesh Ranganathan in Alan Ayckbourn’s psychological comedy WOMAN IN MIND, which plays a strictly limited West End run at the Duke of York’s Theatre.
by Stephi Wild - October 8, 2025
Romesh Ranganathan will make his West End stage debut in a new production of Alan Ayckbourn's psychological comedy WOMAN IN MIND in a strictly limited West End run. Learn more here!
by Stephi Wild - September 18, 2025
A new production of Alan Ayckbourn's psychological comedy WOMAN IN MIND will star Sheridan Smith in a strictly limited West End run at the Duke of York's Theatre.
Woman in Mind History
Other Productions of Woman in Mind
| 1988 | Off-Broadway |
Off-Broadway |
| 2025 | West End |
West End |
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