Woman in Mind by Alan Ayckbourn (1986)
Theatre | Tragicomedy
Blurb:
“By turns sad and funny, satiric and moving, Alan Ayckbourn’s intelligent British comedy Woman in Mind charts, without sentimentality or heartless irony, a frowsy middle-aged Englishwoman’s hopeless descent into psychosis.”
–Goodreads
pooled ink Review:
This play is told from a subjective viewpoint as in everything you see or hear is from Susan’s perspective. Perhaps it’s not reality but it is Susan’s reality.
Ayckbourn is quite clever. I enjoyed this play and how it made you feel guilty for laughing because although on the surface everything was quite hilarious deeper down it was incredibly sad. I could go on in more english class style detail about how even the shape/writing style reflected the descension into madness but even without all that analytical nonsense this is quite the good read.
Cheers.
Review originally posted on Goodreads on February 19, 2015
Purchase here: Woman in Mind
Meet Alan Ayckbourn!
Sir Alan Ayckbourn is a popular and prolific English playwright. He has written and produced seventy-three full-length plays in Scarborough and London and was, between 1972 and 2009, the artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, where all but four of his plays have received their first performance. More than 40 have subsequently been produced in the West End, at the Royal National Theatre or by the Royal Shakespeare Company since his first hit Relatively Speaking opened at the Duke of York’s Theatre in 1967.
-Goodreads
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