THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By Alan Ayckbourn
Duke of York’s Theatre, St Martin’s Lane, WC2N 4BG until February 28, 2026 then on tour to Sunderland Empire (March 4 to 7) and Theatre Royal Glasgow (March 10 to 14)
The great Sheridan Smith, who had a sold out run for Shirley Valentine in this theater, is back there for a rare revival of one of Ayckbourn’s most highly regarded works. Like Shirley, Susan, the protagonist here, is the epitome of the frustrated, taken for granted, suburban housewife. After she sustains a bump to the head, her world splits in two. One is mundane with a smug vicar husband, a bitter sister-in-law and a selfish son. The other is imagined, with a perfect husband, a dashing tennis playing son and devoted daughter about to be a glowing bride. Eventually the lines begin to blur. Julia McKenzie won a clutch of awards for the first West End premiere in 1985 but, alas, despite great performances here, as a play it just doesn’t cut it anymore.
It’s a study of someone in acute mental crisis but it seems to get choked by its own clever conceit. Here the parallel lives are played out on either side of the lowering safety curtain, colorfully painted with flowers.
Ayckbourn, whose trademark is straddling a fine line between light comedy and domestic trauma has always played with form in his plays. Often each play had a new ‘trick’, reaching its apotheosis in House and Garden at the National Theatre when different aspects of the same play ran simultaneously in two adjoining theaters, with characters racing between the two – a form of theatrical clockwork that would impress a Swiss watchmaker.
He was applauded at this time for going darker with this play but, as a long time devotee of his work, I think he was far more serious when he was being painfully funny (for example in Absurd Person Singular) than here where he seemed to be striving for seriousness. It reminds one of Woody Allen who went all Bergmanesque in Interiors and fell flat on his face.
What strikes one too is how the sexual politics of the early ‘80s now seems like another planet. The trope of the frustrated housewife with no options hardly exists today as women wish to, or need to, work and have their own lives. This makes Susan appear rather self-absorbed at times and director Michael Longhurst’s languid pacing doesn’t help. It displays her pain in a very singular aspect (the hallucination of the fantasy life) while not really delving into what drove it. She lacks interiority. The imagined family are mere ciphers and her real family, while vividly brought to live by this great troupe of character actors, really don’t appear to evolve.
Smith is absolutely compelling, though, as Susan, capturing her lifetime of disappointment, her keen intelligence, her thwarted hopes, her sensuality and her wit, firing waspish retorts at her poisonous sister-in-law Muriel. Louise Brealey is a delight as the latter – a sainted widow installed by the vicar to “help out”. Tim McMullan is a stand-out as the husband, Gerald. Tedious and pompous and absorbed in writing a 600 year history of the parish, his passive aggression to her is painted over with a veneer of platitudes. She nails him with the line “Think of what we’d have achieved with our lives if we didn’t always have to discuss everything first”.
The pleasant surprise of the piece is TV star Romesh Ranganathan in a witty, warm and restrained performance as Bill, Susan’s doctor, who tries to anchor her in some reality. Ranganathan perfectly captures the gawkiness and the irritating chuckle of the old family friend.
In the closing scenes, Susan losing her grip is manifested in her inability to maintain control of the fantasy family, who morph into various unsavory characters, but, as Soutra Gilmour’s wildly lush garden setting (more Florida than Chislehurst) gets drowned in a rain shower, it does leave the audience rather suspended.
