ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST. To 13 March 2004.

Mold/Cardiff

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST
by Dale Wasserman from the novel by Ken Kesey

Clwyd Theatre Cymru (Anthony Hopkins Theatre) To 6 March then New Theatre Cardiff 9-13 March 2004
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat 2.30pm
Audio-described 28 Feb 2.30pm, 4 March
Captioned 6 March 2.30pm
Talkback 26 Feb, 4 March
Runs 2hr 20min One interval

TICKETS:0845 330 3565
www.clwyd-theatr-cymru.co.uk (Mold)
029 2087 8889 (Cardiff)
Review: Timothy Ramsden 19 February.

Intelligently full-blooded production asserting the piece's political punch.I was once invited to a meeting in a company where the manager told me there was team-work. The timing was decided by the manager; the meeting took place in his office, was chaired by him from behind his desk, with him setting the agenda and making the ultimate decisions. Others provided information and made suggestions.

It came to mind watching Terry Hands' high-voltage revival of Cuckoo's Nest . Authority red in tooth and claw, but not quite naked; rather, hiding behind the skirts of liberal governance. Feebly reasonable Dr Spivey may be the nominal authority, may even delay the electric shocks and lobotomy, but the forces of control represented by the skilful hatchet-woman Ratched only have to wait patiently - and not wait very long - to bring in the big guns.

And when her truncheon-wielding aides get to work, it's dear old Spivey who silently brings on the strait-jackets to complete the coup. Robert J. Page expertly gets both comic mileage and political impotence out of the role - the kind of acting that unshowily reminds how, in the right hands, there's no such thing as a small role.

Kerry Peers' Nurse Ratched ('rat-shit' as her wild-man enemy McMurphy calls her) has no truck with the subtlety Isla Blair brought to the role in the Touring Consortium production a few years back. This is naked malevolence, brooking no opposition, from the start. Simon Armstrong's Dale Harding may be elected chair of the patients' council but come therapy time it's Ratched who manipulates events and takes centre-stage whenever she wants.

Standing legs apart, holding her huge metal key-ring in clasped hands as symbol both of institutional control and (in a play that repeatedly mentions Freud) sublimated sexual dominance, this Ratched is an openly evil force, delighting in her subtle range of power like an evil witch.

Eventually, McMurphy assaults the ramparts of Ratched's breasts, ripping her white uniform top aside. But it's the power structure he's attacking - a structure whose nature is made clear by Mark Bailey's white-walled set, with its grey prison-cell doors, realistic nurses' rooms replaced by a prison-like gantry from which Ratched issues orders by a huge, life-regulating, clock.

Hands' production identifies Spivey's clearly detailed theory of social-democratic therapy as political cosmetic in a thunderously melodramatic confrontation of good and evil leading to a final firework explosion equivalent of the Victorian stage's train-crash.

Yet there's nothing crude here, but beautiful detail - such as the way John Cording's Scanlon protectively clutches his supposed home-made bomb when Ratched talks of removing privileges. And Oliver Ryan's Billy finely articulates Billy's move to confidence with the women McMurphy smuggles in, and the retreat into guiltily fearful stuttering to which Ratched forces him back.

Life no longer seems so easy as it was in the 1962 novel's, or 1963 play's, time. Georgina Field's fun-loving Candy Starr may bring Billy to life, but there's no way she'd stick around for him. And, people here vote for the government, however undemocratically it behaves. Just as, Harding admits, nearly all the patients are free to leave, but would be back in two days if they did. Ratched knows that; it's the basis of her power.

For, be honest - out on the streets, how many of us would run a mile from Randle, and clutch Nurse's starched white coat for certainty and security?

Yet between them Hands and Robert Perkins reinvent the outdated social disruptive McMurphy as someone pointedly discovering how fake the democratic veneer of his society is. He's got out of prison by being admitted here - but prison sentences end; incarceration in the self-satisfied madhouse goes on.

Chief Bromden: Dyfrig Morris
Aide Warren: Anthony Mark Barrow
Aide Williams: Marc Small
Nurse Ratched: Kerry Peers
Nurse Flinn: Catrin Aaron
Dale Harding: Simon Armstrong
Billy Bibbit: Oliver Ryan
Scanlon: John Cording
Cheswick: Robert Blythe
Martini: Wayne Cater
Ruckly: Grahame Fox
Randle P McMurphy: Robert Perkins
Dr Spivey: Robert J Page
Candy Starr: Georgina Field
Sandra: Sally Evans

Director/Lighting: Terry Hands
Designer: Mark Bailey
Sound: Kevin Heyes
Fight director: Terry King
Dialect coach: Robert Macdonald
Assistant director: Phillip Breen
Composer: Colin Towns

2004-02-20 12:44:07