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<\/a><\/a><\/a>Naturally, Nurse Ratched awakens memories in the audience: neat, controlled, ruling over the men\u2019s ward, dismissing the ridiculous, almost caricature-like doctor. And in her precise mouth, the word punishment hisses like a snake. A merciless performance by Olivia Williams \u2014 she plays shades of embodied evil that shimmer and ripple like an oxide film on overheated metal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Doctor (Matthew Steer, recently seen in Arcadia at The Old Vic): disheveled, mustachioed, bespectacled, hopping about the stage with a kind of chicken-like jitter, wagging his finger \u2014 but who listens to him? Any male nurse (dressed here, by the way, in dapper white suits with black bow ties) matters more than this laughable little doctor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The audience sits around the stage \u2014 its mosaic pattern echoing Congo Square \u2014 like around an almost ancient arena, looming over it, becoming both witness and participant, as if in a religious rite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And indeed, this Cuckoo\u2019s Nest resembles the enactment of an unseen ritual \u2014 perhaps an ecumenical one. There are fluid shamanic dances to the beat of the djembe, a silent spirit of an Indigenous tribe holding the skull of a horned animal, and a blissful figure with arms outstretched in crucifixion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You will, of course, remember that the protagonist enters the psychiatric ward to avoid trouble with the law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This McMurphy has nothing demonic, truly criminal, or even revolutionary about him. There is something childlike in his manner, boyish, genuinely clownish, fairground-like, alive. His element is play. A play that cannot be justified in the black-and-white circular world of Nurse Ratched. For her, play is destructive; life itself is destructive simply by existing. What, by the way, would be the antonym of the word play?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aaron Pierre plays McMurphy so vividly it feels as if he\u2019s painted in fluorescent acrylic. The audience responds with delighted laughter that swells into something like a stadium roar \u2014 he draws not only the patients but all of us into his game, pulling us into a whirl of mischievous revelry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Petrushka, Punch, Hanswurst \u2014 it\u2019s impossible not to recall these truly folk characters in the context of this Cuckoo\u2019s Nest. And all the more terrifying, then, is the Hero\u2019s Journey, the arc that leads him to a tragic end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is also another central figure here \u2014 the Chief, the complete opposite of McMurphy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n