Andy, Susan's imaginary husband, handsome, devoted, master cook, and everything missing from Gerald; Sally Hartley steals the show with an epic performance as the protagonist Susan. Running through a gamut of emotions and on stage throughout, she shows great psychological depth as she handles this poignant and harrowing mental breakdown. She is well supported by confident newcomers, namely Steve Burt (Andy) and Ben Tanner (Tony) taking the roles of her imaginary family members with Kirsty Terry as her sweet devoted daughter Lucy.

Now late at night and during a thunderstorm, Gerald comes looking for Susan. While they have slept, his manuscript has been set alight and a message has been left on Muriel’s ceiling purporting to be from her dead husband. Unable to cope with her behaviour any more, Gerald leaves Susan who is having a complete breakdown. Lost in her own world as she attends Lucy’s wedding, events become more grotesque and she begins speaking the same strange language she heard Bill speaking at the start of the play. Delivering a final speech, her now intertwined fantasy and real families abandon her until she is alone in darkness, pleading ’December Bee’ (remember me) lit only by the siren light of an ambulance. There is plenty of enjoyment to be had from this moving production as the accomplished cast unravel Susan’s torment and appear to be talking nonsense! However, next to her fictional family, they are saints, as the trio, doting husband, Andy (Steve Burt), irrepressible brother Tony (Ben Tanner) and perfect daughter, Lucy (Kirsty Terry) lead us all into a darker, disturbing world. Susan Woman in Mind is a play about a woman slowly losing her grip on reality. She has reached a sexual, social and intellectual crossroads. She is a vicar's wife who has fancifully invented another family straight out of a 1950s magazine: a husband with a white suit, a slightly mischievous brother and a lovely daughter who adores her. Her family are, in fact, an extremely gloomy set of people, but I wrote the play from this woman's point of view, inviting the audience to empathise with her. In the end the woman has a breakdown and just closes down altogether, which is very upsetting.

The cast of Alan Ayckbourn’s Woman in Mind

The woman is Susan; neglected by her insensitive, loud-mouthed husband Gerald and rejected by their only son, the poor woman feels useless and hopeless. Is it surprising that she invents an ideal loving family with an enviable lifestyle and a dwelling with vast grounds compete with lake, tennis courts and swimming pool. This new family become reality to her, so real that they actually appear surrounding her with love and acclaim, a different world for her to escape her unhappy life. For a long time she is between the two worlds, but gradually they intertwine, sometimes confusingly but eventually, and tragically, the imaginary world takes over and refuses to leave.

Because of the nature of this particular play, it is likely that some members of the audience will stop laughing before the others do. Generally, the women stopped earlier on! It’s important to emphasise that Susan must always appear quite ordinary. It's a difficult quality sometimes for an actress to catch. Most people who want to act are quite extraordinary!. We should never get the feeling - what's this remarkable woman doing putting up with all this? Brilliant designer Les Brotherston has created an amazing set spreading right across the stage and beyond, with lawn, flower beds, walls and steps so solid and sturdy they seem to have been there forever, all enhanced superbly by Mark Henderson’s lighting with sound and video by Simon Baker. The whole is so effective that is seems we are there with them in the garden as day turns to night and a raging thunderstorm reflects the chaos in Susan’s mind.Cast: Janie Dee, Perdita Avery, Stuart Fox, Bill Champion, Joanna David, Dominic Hecht, Paul Kemp, Martin Parr If what you did was totally insensitive and crass, she may never be able look at you in the same light and it may be too much to expect that trust can be regained easily, if ever. She may, in fact, never be able to see you as the same person. However, if what you did to her is more trivial and does not seem so much to her, you might approach her sensitively to good effect.

I tell actors playing Gerald to be as nice as possible - if he says all the lines he'll never manage it - but he should try to be. It is very important that characters like Gerald are not so far out on the limb of outrageous caricature by the climax of the play that we cannot suddenly wonder if the man has a point after all as Susan destroys his precious manuscript. After all, we've only had Susan's word about him up till now and at this stage, how reliable is her word any longer? His protagonist, Susan (Sally Hartley), following a concussion, finds herself embraced by the perfect fantasy family, a stark contrast to her patronising and distracted husband, Gerald (Pete Woodward) and her nightmarish sister-in-law, Muriel (Sarah Parnell). Director Andrew Caple and his technical team have produced an interesting garden setting complete with lawn, pots and trellis, while the sound technicians have excelled with tortuous magnified voices and weather effects. Wardrobe too have ensured the cast are appropriately well costumed.Most of my plays at some level are autobiographical. I think Woman in Mind , in the end, is no more and no less than many others. Susan, a middle aged housewife, lives a drab, disappointed existence. Ignored by her husband, disowned by her son, she survives by conjuring up an imaginary family with whom she can live out her dreams. But when the strain gets too much, fantasy and reality start to collide in an increasingly absurd and comic sequence of events. What does the 'incomprehensible' language Susan hears in the first scene and speaks in the final scene mean?