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)