'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' review — Aaron Pierre and Giles Terera star in Clint Dyer's bold new staging of a classic

Read our review of One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest, starring Aaron Pierre and Giles Terera, now in performances at The Old Vic through 23 May.

Summary

• Aaron Pierre; Giles Terera and Kedar Williams-Stirling star in Clint Dyer's production
• One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest follows agitator Randle P McMurphy as he is transferred to Nurse Ratched's tightly controlled ward
• The production runs at The Old Vic through May

The importance of community, belonging, and brotherhood is at the heart of Clint Dyer’s sensitively directed Old Vic production of Dale Wasserman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Wasserman’s play was originally based on the 1962 novel by Ken Kesey, and the last major London production was staged 20 years ago with Christian Slater playing the lead Randle P. McMurphy. Dyer has taken a bold approach with his revival, tapping into America’s colonial history by mirroring the atmosphere and energy of New Orleans’ Congo Square — a meeting point for enslaved African Americans and Indigenous communities since the 19th century — with Nurse Ratched’s tightly controlled psychiatric ward. It becomes home to the show’s protagonist — the gambler and agitator McMurphy — after he feigns insanity to avoid a prison work farm for battery and rape.

Dyer’s vision is felt most keenly in the production’s opening and closing scenes, which are full of the rich sights and sounds of Mardi Gras Indian parades, as the ensemble cast enter beating drums and singing, washed in Chris Davey’s murky amber light. He has also assembled an impressive, predominantly Black cast as Ratched’s patients to foreground the novel’s colonial implications — and it is their palpable chemistry that is the production’s biggest success.

Each is so well drawn, from Kedar Williams-Stirling’s sweet, stammering Billy Bibbit and Jason Pennycooke’s excitable Martini, to Javone Prince’s knee-bouncing Cheswick, though this presentation of damaged men and mental health is frequently uncomfortable, such as seeing Ene Frost’s extreme physical performance as Ruckley — a man so chewed up by the institution that he becomes a cautionary tale for the other patients. The horror of the play’s denouement lands because we build such a rapport with the (often very funny) characters: indeed, the party scene in which McMurphy smuggles in alcohol and women and sees Billy finally lose his virginity is a hilarious and tightly directed series of intimate moments.

Chief Bromden’s narration in the book is given greater space in Dyer’s production, with evocative vignettes capturing memories of his ancestral tribe that collide with brutal imagery of the oppressive and controlling metaphorical ‘Combine’. Gino Ricardo Green’s unsettling video design seems to take us right behind the eyeball as patients writhe and convulse in a frightening tableau.

Giles Terera, recently seen playing former US president Abraham Lincoln in Oh, Mary!, offers strong supporting work as genteel, unofficial leader of the ‘Acutes’ (the patients deemed curable) Dale Harding. He humorously draws out Harding’s faux intellectual energy, as well as gently depicting his hidden homosexuality, constantly clasping his silk robe at the neck and strolling around the ward with a dignified air.

Aaron Pierre, better known for his screen work in Rebel Ridge and The Morning Show, departs from the menacing, calculated performance of McMurphy famously delivered by Jack Nicholson in the 1975 film adaptation. His McMurphy is simpler, with a tic that sees him constantly blinking hard and unable to remain still. He is charismatic and a performer (his coquettish provocation of Nurse Ratched in one scene involving a bath towel is particularly entertaining), but there are flashes of violence that foreshadow his eventual undoing.

Olivia Williams, who stepped in as Nurse Ratched when Michelle Gomez withdrew, is suitably detached, and captures an interesting pseudo maternal relationship with the young Billy. But her performance needed more iciness to be truly intimidating, and greater depth and complexity is required for the battle of wills between her and McMurphy.

One Flew forms part of artistic director Matthew Warchus’s hugely successful final series of plays at The Old Vic, specifically staged in-the-round. The recent revival of Stoppard’s Arcadia worked magnificently in this configuration, and the same can be said for Dyer’s Cuckoo, which brings the audience into the action by naming us the incurable 'Chronics'. It is an intense 2 hours and 35 minutes on the ward, but Dyer has created something fresh and provoking.

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Photo credit: The cast of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. (Photos by Manuel Harlan)