Old Vics Cuckoos Nest: A Hospital Cage Fight

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (Old Vic Theatre, London)

Verdict: Manically impressive

Rating:

Over the past six decades, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest has become an unassailable cultural landmark. That’s partly thanks to ’s turn in the 1975 movie, but also to the cult status of Ken Kesey’s novel in Sixties counter culture.

At the same time, its sexual politics have grown awkward – not to say ‘problematic’.

Seemingly oblivious to that, Clint Dyer’s high-energy, mostly black revival reclaims Dale Wasserman’s 1963 stage adaptation as a parable of colonisation and jubilant emancipation. Happily, it’s not too much of a stretch, in line with Kesey’s reputation as an acid-dropping hippy dreamer.

The show embraces the story as a carnivalesque, psychiatric melodrama bookended with wild African dance and drumming.

As Nicholson’s convict character Randle P. McMurphy, leading man Aaron Pierre is a rogue messiah, championing the other downtrodden black patients he finds in the secure hospital, run as a penal colony by brutal white Nurse Ratched (Olivia Williams).

And he’s particularly invested in the liberation of the inscrutable Native American, Chief (Arthur Boan), whose people have been ethnically cleansed in mind, body and soul by the American dream.

The ‘problematic’ part is that Dyer’s production is almost completely silent on the story’s sexism – not only demonising Nurse Ratched as a totalitarian automaton, but also extolling McMurphy’s sexual emancipation, despite his conviction for the statutory rape of a 15-year-old child.

Instead, it’s a power struggle – a cage fight, staged in a dazzling white day room with Lino tiles, overlooked by surveillance balconies. Sexual politics are simply vaporised.

Pierre has the physique of a heavyweight boxer, but shows a tender side as he hugs his fellow patients and exhorts them to resist Ratched.

Williams is his equal and opposite: a small, tidy, conspicuously patient angel of death, freezing all before her with long cold stares over horn-rimmed spectacles.

Boan’s mostly silent Chief doubles as a kind of shamanic commentator.

And the reliably terrific Giles Terera occupies the centre ground, with the subtlest performance, as middle-aged Dale – who has committed himself to hospital to deal with agonising sexual dysfunction.

Liberation may not be for everyone in this Cuckoo’s Nest, but it’s never less than manically impressive.

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest runs until May 23 at the Old Vic.

Avenue Q (Shaftesbury Theatre, London) 

Verdict: Sex mad marionettes

Rating:

Pub quiz geeks may be interested to learn that a young Giles Terera  - currently appearing in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest at the Old Vic (reviewed above) - was also in the original West End cast of the Broadway hit Avenue Q, back in 2006. 

The puppet musical, about the trials and tribulations of young people finding their way in the world, is back in the West End for its 20th anniversary. But be warned: it contains puppet nudity, and scenes of raucous marionette fornication.

The randy glove puppets include literature grad Princeton, who sings that ‘It Sucks To Be Me’ as he tries to find his purpose in life.

He is pursued by trainee teacher Kate Monster, but falls for pink-faced pole dancer Lucy The Slut, in a universe that interacts on a madcap Manhattan street with a human couple, (Christmas) Eve and Brian, as well as former child actor handyman Gary.

Two decades on, it is a tad dated. The tune The Internet Is For Porn is not the joke it once may have been; and the rap Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist also feels more factual than satirical.

But it’s still driven by the agonies of heartbreak and social anxiety, including gay bookworm Rod, who is urged to get out of the closet by grungy roommate Nicky.

Robert Lopez’s and Jeff Marx’s music and lyrics hold up, too; veering between Sondheimish social commentary and excruciating kitsch.

To its credit, the show never takes itself seriously, with the surreal Japanese-American character Christmas Eve (Amelia Kinu Muus) warbling that ‘love and hate, they like two brothers who go on a date’.

And we must admire the puppeteers, too; in particular the Shirley Bassey-ish Emily Benjamin, howling Lucy’s lewd belters.

Crucially, young adults can relax and relate to a show from a more forgiving, less censorious time. 

Avenue Q is booking until August 29 at the Shaftesbury Theatre.

ALSO PLAYING...BY GEORGINA BROWN

Flyby (Southwark Playhouse, London)

Verdict: Mission not quite accomplished

Rating:

In a week when we have been to the moon and back with Artemis II, a new musical boldly goes where none has gone before.

There is something heroic about writer/composer Theo Jamieson and director Adam Lenson’s original, ambitious musical reach - and Flyby has flashes of brilliance - but it ultimately gets lost in space. As does 34-year-old astronaut, Daniel Defoe (yep, as in the writer of Robinson Crusoe - one silly idea that should have been jettisoned) who has gone AWOL, stealing a space capsule. Why?

Following Daniel’s disappearance, the piece re-enters Earth, where Daniel and Emily, who barely know one another, are holed up in a ‘rustic’ Airbnb. And where the piece gets stuck too long, thanks to a trio of all-knowing singing commentators listing explanations for Emily’s awfulness (entitled Daddy’s girl/nepo-baby whose philandering father made violent films for children) and reasons (thousands of them, numbered, typed and projected on the walls of the stage) why sensitive, traumatised Daniel is the last guy on the planet she should be dating. Too much information, too little dramatisation. No wonder he wants out.

However, a kamikaze excursion into the void is absurdly extreme. Maybe it’s just a cosmic metaphor?

Appalling though Emily is, a luminous Poppy Gilbert (Lizzie in The Other Bennet Girl) is enthralling and, while remaining earthbound, truly stellar.

As sweet, suicidal Daniel, the lovely tenor Stuart Thompson is deeply touching but his behaviour makes no sense, least of all his big number: ‘Could you build me a distant lighthouse, with you the light to guide me home?’ He surely can’t mean scary Emily?

Jamieson’s score thrillingly mixes Sondheim-esque strings and piano with soaring lush symphonic melodies which, alas, invariably fail to fulfil their promise - and never linger.

The result is rich, bewildering but frustrating, culminating in the appearance of a giant sea turtle (possibly a person, possibly animatronic), simultaneously as daft and as dazzling as the this show. Reprogrammed, it could go places.

Flyby runs at Southwark Playhouse until May 16.