Director Clint Dyer has put a very bold spin on Dale Wasserman’s 1963 stage adaptation of Ken Kelsey’s countercultural classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Former National Theatre deputy Dyer has reimagined it as an intersectional work about racial hierarchies, in which the outnumbered white staff of a psychiatric hospital keep a largely Black patient population in check via icy self-belief and exploitation of their patients’ vulnerabilities. On paper it’s a solid metaphor for systematic oppression, that chimes with the civil rights era in which the play was written.
But Kesey’s essentially libertarian allegory for how the system crushes bright, interesting and rebellious individuals does not really translate that well into a parable of collective solidarity.
And it’s not just a question of intent, but quality. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is not exactly Shakespeare-level stuff, ie a text so fundamentally robust that it can take aggressive reinterpretation. Rather, it’s a paranoid individualist hippie’s view of the mid-century US mental healthcare system. It’s not without merit in 2026, but as a cultural artefact it clearly peaked in significance over half a century ago with the Jack Nicholson film (something its Christian Slater-starring last London revival unabashedly channelled).
Pre-show, information is projected onto the walls about the historic African-American gathering space of Congo Square in New Orleans, and the origin of the city’s Black Mardi Gras Indians. Ben Stones’s set is deftly designed to resemble both a mental hospital commons and the design of Congo Square. But there’s a mood board quality to this – establishing links between America’s Black and Native populations, but doing so via information that is fundamentally not carried into the story. The play text never mentions Congo Square. The one inmate whose ethnicity is actually specified – and who therefore isn’t Black here – is Native American actor Arthur Boan’s Chief Harding (I’d wondered if the projected text was laying the groundwork to make the character a Mardi Gras Indian but no, and the text simply doesn’t support it).
And look, it’s okay. TV star Aaron Pierre feels somewhat miscast in the role of charismatic petty criminal Randle P McMurphy. Having gotten himself committed on (probably) spurious grounds in order to avoid going to jail-jail, he buzzes anarchically around the institution like a mischievous fruit fly, creating trouble, questioning the rules, pointedly refusing to take Olivia Williams’ icy Nurse Ratched seriously. But it’s too light a performance: he’s so untroubled by Ratched et al that there’s a lack of friction until the very end, a cheeky Road Runner to her Wile E Coyote.
But the supporting cast is largely great, not least Giles Terera, an actor of great stature who seems happy (or stoic) about taking on characterful supporting roles. Fresh from playing a cartoonishly closeted Abraham Lincoln in Oh, Mary!, he does altogether more subtle, poignant work here as Dale Harding, the intelligent but broken ‘father’ of the inmates. As we find out later, Dale hasn’t in fact been committed to the institution but chooses to stay there - in part, clearly, to run away from his wife. Terera has fun with the play's anarchy, but he’s the only one who finds real depths to his character, and his lovely singing voice gets deployed a couple of times to boot.
Despite joining the production late as a replacement for Michelle Gomez, Williams does a fine job as Ratched, whose froideur is tempered by a benign, motherly quality… just so long as nobody tries to interfere with her hierarchical approach to running the place.
And yes, of course you can see exactly what Dyer means as he repurposes One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as an allegory for minority white control systems over Black populations, be that the Antebellum South, the pre-Civil Rights era, or indeed today. Ratched’s orderly system – benign just so long as everyone knows its place – will do you fine as an allegory for the British Empire.
But none of that’s in the text! You can suggest the connections, but again, the script doesn’t actually have anything specific to say about Blackness or the African American experience. You can understand Dyer’s intent, but that doesn’t mean it lands incisively. And the attempts to drum up broader themes of solidarity between African Americans and Native Americans feel tenuous and pretty gauche coming from a bunch of Brits. Really it’s crying out for a fresh stage adaptation that might make these points better, but presumably the Kesey estate is unlikely to be into this.
It’s a really interesting idea, with a mostly great cast, of a historically significant play that I can’t imagine getting revived again any time soon. Go in with a spirit of adventure and an affordable ticket and I don’t think you’ll feel you’ve wasted your time. But the bottom line is: it just doesn’t work.
