One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Review – Aaron Bier makes a charming McMurphy | stage

WWhen Randall P. McMurphy was sent to an American psychiatric hospital in the early 1960s, the lethargic air began to crack. As the anarchic McMurphy, Aaron Bier gives a blistering performance, but although Clint Dyer’s evocative take on Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel boldly reworks the story, the script can’t support his ideas.

McMurphy immediately locks horns with domineering Nurse Ratched (Olivia Williams). He spins, provokes, and urges his fellow patients to fight back, play, and celebrate. Pierre wanders the space with a billowing drape or an elegant, asymmetrical rug. He offers a good brotherly hug, but there’s a frantic vulnerability beneath the booming laugh.

Dyer’s devastating 2022 production of Othello with Giles Terreira mercilessly tore apart a racist world. By casting the inmates of Cuckoo’s Nest with a predominantly black cast, Dyer gives Casey’s tale a new political edge, as pawns in a system designed to weaken power. Every time Ratched addresses men as “boys,” it is implicit mockery.

But race is not mentioned in the script – except for Chief Bromden (Arthur Boan), the sole survivor of an indigenous tribe and a selective mute, who conveys the suffering of industrial psychiatry. What is evident in both the original novel and this 1963 adaptation by Dale Wasserman is relentless misogyny – so this reading seems both radical and reactionary at the same time.

“I fight and I fuck,” McMurphy declares. His free individualism is directed towards the recovery of the alpha male. The patient stories we hear involve a stifling mother or a dissatisfied wife, and this whole system is coercion and control – a lobotomy is “brain castration” – and in Nurse Ratched, she is objectified as female.

Williams, who took over the role late in rehearsals, gave Ratched a stern backbone and a starched smile. She is nominally subordinate to a group of doctors (Matthew Steer) who laugh at medical observations and run out of trouble – but there is little oversight of their increasingly brutal abuse of power.

Casey knew this environment inside out. While a student, he enrolled as a guinea pig in a government research study on the effects of LSD and other hallucinogens. Shortly after publishing his novel, he crossed the United States with his band of Merry Pranksters on a psychedelic bus – raising a countercultural finger to mid-century mores. His novel had the support of the anti-psychiatry movement, and institutional brutalities were powerfully featured in Chris Davie’s angry, crimson-and-blue lighting. Medications are soothing, group therapy becomes snitching or bullying, and electroconvulsive therapy becomes a painful ritual.

While watching on tour, we become a loop of often startled observers. The floor, with its white and green tiles, is a tight circle, but in Ben Stones’ design, the Old Vic’s soaring ceiling gives the confined space an aspirational appeal, a yearning to soar up and away.

The patients move through bouts of distress and delirium: the powerful ensemble, led by Terrira’s dapper Dale Harding, a paisley robe over his uniform, creates an unobtrusive appearance of tics and distractions. Dyer concludes his production by recalling Congo Square in New Orleans, a historic site of Black and Indigenous celebration and resistance. His disturbing version sees the cruelty of the play through their eyes – but it is largely a male gaze.