One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Jessica Jennings finds this particular bird to something of an underdone turkey.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Fitzpatrick Theatre

1/5

Having read the badly written, misspelt flyer for this production, I was less than optimistic about it. But, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is such a great, iconic adaptation with little room for erroneous interpretation that I thought at the very worst, this could be just a crap rendition of something vastly entertaining. I feel a bit silly now.

The first group scene, it seems fair to say, was awful. The indecipherably garbled lines and miscalculated mumbles drew the focus of the scene every direction other from that which it should have been going. Instead of being a gripping introduction to the mental institution setting and its atmosphere, this opening was a dull, droning stumble. The cast fail to gel as they should, a result of each actor being too much concerned with his own well-trodden caricature to think of what it all sounds and looks like to an audience. The desire to portray crazy overwhelms the integrity of the production and leaves it chaotic and too convincingly disordered.

It could be that the crux of the disorder lies in the slightly powerless Nurse Rached. Whilst Holly Olivia Braine should be congratulated for venturing away from the depiction of her character in the 1975 film version (which was rare in this production), her characterisation lacked the 'rigid grip on her authority' which the flyer ascribes to Nurse Rached. This probably was not helped by the costume choice, having her in the same uniform as the minor nurses, but was also a result of her words being consumed by an absence of a regular speech pattern. Mismatches in intonation and intention made it difficult for her to pull the scenes together as she should have done. There was no sense that she knew anything more than any of the other characters, and it was hard to be convinced that she could have pulled together and influence the group of patients even before the infuriatingly twitchy McMurphy (James Murray) arrived.

The tension, therefore, between Nurse Rached and McMurphy, with his exasperating penchant for a frustratingly fake crazy-laugh, was somewhat dull. Sadly, this battle of wills is the core of the storyline, and a result of it being lacklustre was that the performance became increasingly boring. It was too easy to lose all interest in what was going on, making the whole experience quite unpleasant.

There were, however, moments of brilliance. The Chief (Arthur Stril) shone in his soliloquies, which, barring some unfortunate lighting mishaps, were almost flawless. The pithy delusional monologues were focused, and were an opportunity finally to concentrate of the beautiful words of the play and its sophisticated, intricate insights.

Another good performance came from Uriel Adiv in his role of Mr Harding. His was, apart from Stril's, the most fluent and engaging performance. Regrettably, however, by the time his character really came into play, the excruciating dreariness of the rest of the play had set in and the dire apathy had been established.

The second half of the play got weaker and weaker, and by the end I was more interested in my own blinking than in the stage. It seemed as though the cast were unable to deal with the slip-ups (missing or erroneous sound effects, set malfunctions, lighting blunders) of the first half and descended into a desperate attempt to reach the end of the story so they could all go home and start again next time. Maybe next time will be better. Half of the star rating goes to the cast for hoping, and the other to audience for clapping at the end.

Jessica Jennings