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New Moon is nothing if not an international advertisement for the hungry virtues of virginity and young people can’t get enough of it
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Theatre
A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
Cock
Restaurants
Kitchen W8 is a bargain for this area, if such sophistication is what you crave
Kitchen W8
Too long and drawn out but very entertaining with excellent special effects
This is a peculiar play and does not work for me. Some of it is very funny but there are real flaws
Alex has a strong powerful voice and was faultless, she is far better now than she was on the X-Factor
London,
Nicholas de Jongh's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Alan Ayckbourn.
Cast: Perdita Avery, John Branwell, Bill Champion, Janie Dee
Description: Alan Ayckbourn's bittersweet romantic comedy, starring Janie Dee.
Trains: Tube/BR: Charing Cross 
Phone: 0870890 0511
Website: www.nimaxtheatres.com
Fantasy family: Susan (Janie Dee), Andy (Bill Champion) and Lucy (Perdita Avery)
No playwright alive better understands how to touch the hearts and funny-bones of middle-aged, middle Englanders than Alan Ayckbourn. Yet his Woman in Mind, or rather two minds, first seen in London in 1986, comes coloured in a darker shade of black than his conventionally organised, less pessimistic comedies.
This revival, directed by Ayckbourn himself, views the family unit as a source of grief. Religion, organised and disorganised, offers no succour. Through the unreliable perspective of Janie Dee’s stylishly bemused Susan, caught in the long-distance loneliness of a failed marriage, her son not on speaking terms with his parents, Ayckbourn suggests what it feels like to be losing touch with reality.
His comic touch is traditional but he has hit upon a brilliant concept. He dramatises Susan’s two opposing states of mind after she hits her head on a garden rake and suffers concussion. She revives, with Paul Kemp’s clumsy, tentatively smitten GP, Bill, in attendance. At first she talks gibberish. An ambulance is summoned. Susan comes to think she has woken up in hell or else lies in the grip of a delusion.
Into designer Roger Glossop’s oddly nondescript garden come two men and a young woman, dressed in white and quaffing champagne. They are respectively Susan’s doting daughter (a relentlessly simpering Perdita Avery), her swaggering huntsman brother and winsomely adoring husband (Bill Champion). This ghastly trio prove to be Susan’s fantasy projections, early Sixties style, of idealised family life. In the blink of an eye they vanish, to be replaced by dreaded reality: Stuart Fox plays to the manner born her desiccated, bearded reverend-husband, sexually defunct and engaged in writing a history of the parish, while Susan’s widowed sister-in-law, Muriel, offers freelance resentment and bad cooking — a subject about which Ayckbourn makes feeble jokes.
There is a riveting strangeness about the way in which the increasingly disturbed Susan drifts between happy fantasy and painful reality: her son returns from a reclusive sect to reveal himself married, critical of his mother’s imperious interference in his life. Ayckbourn depicts the horrors of mania in terrifying images when Susan’s real and imagined lives finally coalesce. His play is ingenuity incarnate but psychologically speaking his characters remain too generalised archetypes to arouse my sympathy.
Until 3 June (0870 890 0511)
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
