Review Round-Up: ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST at the Old Vic

What are critics saying about One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?

WhatsOnStage

"Urgent, muscular and entirely alive"

★★★★★

Reviewer: Maygan Forbes

"Clint Dyer’s direction is razor sharp, finding rhythm in both chaos and control. The ward is rendered with astonishing precision; Ben Stones’ set transforms the Old Vic into a claustrophobic, watchful institution that feels less like a stage and more like a system closing in. You forget where you are. The walls breathe, the space contracts, and the audience becomes complicit. Paired with Chris Davey’s lighting, which flickers between harsh exposure and uneasy shadow, the production never lets you settle. At its centre, Aaron Pierre is electric as McMurphy. It is a performance of real authority, full of swagger, humour and danger, but also threaded with something more fragile underneath. He commands the stage without ever flattening the ensemble around him. Opposite him, Olivia Williams’ Nurse Ratched is chillingly precise. She does not raise her voice. She does not need to. Control radiates from her in quiet, devastating ways."

Read the review here.

The Times

"Aaron Pierre makes a superb hero"

★★★★

Reviewer: Clive Davis

"Dyer draws remarkably authentic, jittery performances from the rest of the ensemble. Blackouts add to the sense of disorientation. If the in-the-round staging — a fixture in Matthew Warchus’s final season as the Old Vic’s artistic director — means that some of the dialogue goes astray, it draws us into the heart of the skirmishes between staff and patients. At times, we became the kind of voyeurs who once saw the mentally ill as entertainment. This play may be uncomfortable viewing at times, yet it’s exhilarating, too."

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The Telegraph

"Serves as a chilling reminder of the cost of dissent "

★★★★

Reviewer: Dominic Cavendish

"McMurphy’s macho carry-on will be familiar to many, as he stirs the unhinged inmates – among them, Giles Terera as the enjoyably prissy and neurotic Dale Harding – into a more liberated crowd. We could do with a greater sense of the risk of that gamble, a stronger feeling of period and indeed more live-wire volatility all round. Still, the crucified posture into which McMurphy gets contorted during electroconvulsive therapy, as well as the fate that awaits his rebellion, carries the palpable shock of the new. The added racial charge aside, this fittingly intense, non-conformist production delivers a chilling reminder of the perennial cost of dissent."

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Kedar Williams-Stirling and Aaron Pierre in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST. Photo by Manuel Harlan.

The Evening Standard

"Aaron Pierre is electric in problematic story"

★★★

Reviewer: Nick Curtis

"Dyer’s in-the-round production alludes pointedly to the latter, and to America’s legacy of slavery which the far right is currently attempting to whitewash. It begins and ends with a contemporary, drum-driven dance set in New Orleans’ Congo Square, a historic gathering place for Native Americans and enslaved people. An actor representing Bromden’s defeated dad totes a buffalo skull aloft; Terera sings the spiritual Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen; at one point a Civil War soldier pops up. Good-time girl Candy (Daisy Lewis) wears 60s hotpants but also a T-shirt for AC/DC’s Highway to Hell (released 1979). The narrative asides spoken by Bromden are accompanied by torrid representations of mental disturbance on a video screen. The show is a full-on onslaught with little modulation, compelling but exhausting. And throughout there’s the creeping awareness that Kesey and Wasserman partly romanticise mental illness and also use it for comic purposes. Like I say: problematic."

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The Guardian

"Aaron Pierre makes a mesmerising McMurphy"

★★★

Reviewer: David Jays

"Watching in the round, we become a ring of often appalled observers. The floor, with its white and pond-green tiles, is a tight circle, but in Ben Stones’s design, the Old Vic’s high ceiling gives the confining space an aspirational pull, a yearning to elevate up and away. The patients navigate flurries of distress and delirium: the strong ensemble, led by Terera’s refined Dale Harding, a paisley robe over his uniform, creates an unobtrusive patina of tics and deflections. Dyer bookends his production by invoking Congo Square in New Orleans, a historic site of celebration and resistance for Black and Indigenous people. His crackling version sees the play’s cruelties through their eyes – but it’s very much the male gaze."

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The Independent

"Fantastically performed and consistently funny... but where’s the empathy?"

★★

Reviewer: Alice Saville

"There’s still less effort devoted to examining or recontextualising this story’s deeply outdated approach to mental illness. It’s incredibly uncomfortable to watch peoples’ pain be reduced to a freakshow, or comic set dressing: at one point, a man in a state of twitching catatonia is used as a living basketball hoop by his fellow inmates as the audience guffaws. Sure, there can be a dark humour to madness, but it needs to come with an empathy that’s missing here. Dyer also doesn’t interrogate the misogyny of a story where women are either disposable floozies or starched harridans – and the men’s fantasies of violating their bodies are viewed as justified revenge."

Read the review here.

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