Review: ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST starring Giles Terera, The Old Vic

Let’s at least try to shoo the elephant out of the room. Like director, Clint Dyer, I also saw One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest in my mid-teens and failed to understand its allegorical force (that came on reading the book a decade or so later). But Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher delivered performances of such force that I can close my eyes now and see them.

I suspect some of that impact arose from the dawning sense that the world was more complicated than it appeared to a 14 year-old. Bad people (and Randle P McMurphy is a whole lot more evil than your everyday cookie-cutter lovable rogue) really could do good things; and good people (and Nurse Ratched had dedicated her life to caring for her patients) really could do bad things. What mattered more than these intrinsic qualities was the environment in which they found themselves - and whoever controlled that were the real puppetmasters in the circus.

So it’s no good trying to improve the unimprovable - any production has to sway out of the way of those biggest of hitters and turn their force into a means to tell the same story but in a new environment, a new context for our times. A framing device and a casting decision does that.

We open on young black men in New Orleans today with a back projection telling us that the Congo Square Mardi Gras celebrates the long suppressed cultural links between Native American and Afro-Carribean cultures. Both were subject to centuries of genocide, both were/are anaesthetised by intoxicants and both, at least to some extent, have members who are so acculturated to the oppression that they are resigned to its miserable continuation, with resistance periodically flaring up (eg Black Lives Matter) and then managed all the way to irrelevance. And, if not, there’s nearly two million Americans incarcerated to show you what happens if you don’t comply.

When the young men remove their FUBU and other branded clothes, they’re wearing institutional attire (patients and warders) and we’re catapulted back to the early 70s and a secure hospital for the mentally ill. But we know that these men are also those men and that Nurse Ratched’s stiff white uniform, clear white skin and whitest of white accents is a deliberately stark contrast.

The muzak plays and the patients line up, like cows at milking time, for their regular group therapy and conflict, at least on the surface, is barely visible. This is a version of smalltown USA, with its manicured lawns, its gated communities, its yard sales. Everyone understands their role, everyone swallows the drip, drip, drip of drugs to maintain it and the power structure becomes so embedded that it disappears from view. In England, in school assemblies, we sang “All Things Bright And Beautiful” to make sure that we got it too.

Randle P McMurphy lands like a firework at a funeral to upturn this peaceful idyll. Aaron Pierre plays him as a big, loud disruptor, the sort of wiseguy who is wise enough to know everything except where his wisdom runs out. Pierre’s protagonist instantly dominates the space, the patients and the orderlies, partly through his charisma and partly through his injection of confidence into men too long cowed by insidious authority. Pierre might be a little too demonstrative in his interpretation of the iconic role, sometimes you want him to throttle back and play them at their own game, but he certainly shakes us up as much as the patients.

He really only throttles back with Chief, a man he recognises as his equal in intelligence and whom he respects for taking a different course to gaining his power. Arthur Boan is too small to play the Native American elective mute who is both an observer of the ward and our narrator, That matters because McMurphy makes a big play of the metaphor of size and we really have to see that Chief Bromden, like his people, were once huge and have now lost that, crushed geographically, politically, economically by The Combine (his name for The White Man’s oppression). That said, when he returns to the soil ruthlessly grabbed by genocidal invaders, it’s hard not to cheer.

In a wonderful supporting cast, Olivia Williams’s Nurse Ratched isn’t quite as terrifying as she might be, but her syrupy, passive aggressive voice into the microphone from her panopticon perch, still carries a frightening chill. I was surprised not to feel the usual spike of real hatred and disdain I expected when she twists the cruellest of knives into the guts of poor Billy Bibbit (Kedar Williams-Stirling in showstealing form), but maybe that’s the elephant walking back in. Different times make for different responses to male-on-female violence and McMurphy’s showdown with his nemesis is a very hard watch now.

Giles Terera and Jason Pennycooke as the pompous Mr Harding and enthusiastic Mr Martini, bring much of the comedy to a play that writer, Dale Wasserman, has based on Ken Kesey’s book and it’s never less than a delight to hear Terera’s unsurpassed line readings and sweetest of singing voices. There was room for more. 

In the round, on Ben Stones’ circular set, and with the audience occasionally referred to by the cast as the chronics, the patients who are deemed incurable, Dyer makes it clear that we are collaborators in this institution. We literally pen McMurphy and co in, we sentence the patients to their fate, directly or indirectly and we pay for or conspire in the access to, psychotropic drugs, whether legally or illegally acquired. It’s like this because it’s just too tricky, too uncomfortable, too dangerous for us to do anything about it.

We might not feel like we’re acolytes of Nurse Ratched, but we are. 

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest at The Old Vic until 23 May

Photo images: Manuel Harlen

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