One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by the Black Ram Theatre Company, Quay Theatre, Sudbury
The potent energy of caged men is reduced to a dribble under Nurse Ratched's relentless regime in this asylum. Most inmates are supposed to be voluntary, but even the nursing staff crumble at her approach.
New patient McMurphy, committed for rape, stirs and shakes the ward dynamics till, literally, the dumb speak and the deaf hear. His insouciance in Nurse Ratched's face, while deeply funny, ups the ante in what must end in disaster. Russell J Turner's McMurphy rivets both patients and the audience, giving full vent to the pent up anger and fear of the hapless inmates in a superb performance. His nemesis Nurse Ratched, whose killer instincts are wound up to full pitch by Claire Bibby, is driven in her need to control him, but even she has her weaknesses. She engineers McMurphy's destruction whilst trying to appear calm and caring, using words like democracy, it's for your benefit, from her deadly arsenal of meaningless phrases. Her meanness over TV routines and anything redolent of fun is another way to crush any vital signs from her charges.
Chief Bromden, the strikingly tall chief of a lost Indian tribe, is dismissed as a deaf mute. He doesn't miss a trick, but encouraged by McMurphy's attentions and chewing gum, learns to stand symbolically upright. Thomas Renshaw gives Chief's lines a vividly poetic edge, and his final escape is the most optimistic moment of the play. Tom Harthill's Billy Bibbit, oppressed by the joint tyranny of the Nurse and his absent mother, casts all aside for a liberating sexual encounter with Candy Starr (Laura Harding) and learns, momentarily, to be himself.
The symbolism of the lobotomised Ruckly, played by Burtie Welland, apparently crucified on the wall, dominates the action. His great achievement as a mobile basketball hoop is painful and transitory. Dale Harding, whose inflated speeches about Nurse R's love for them all reveal the ghastly opposite, is brilliantly presented by Vincent M Gaine.
Stage adaptations of stories immortalised in film can easily come unstuck, but this powerful version leaves the audience literally in shock after the seeing electric shock therapy applied. No detail of the ghastly business is spared. Chief warns McMurphy, about a former patient, "I'm not saying they killed him. They just worked on him. The way they're working on you." Black Ram works on us, too, in this outstanding production of a deeply unsettling drama.
Mary Dunk 2009
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