One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at The Old Vic
Louise Penn on the South Bank
★★★★☆
23 April 2026
Clint Dyer’s revival of Dale Wasserman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at The Old Vic starts with mention of the Black Masking Indians of Congo Square. A sequence of movement and music sets the tone for a production that will offer something rather different to expectations. Chief (Arthur Boan) is a selective mute of American Indian extraction. He is the watchful presence and our nominal narrator throughout the story. The setting is a mental hospital for men, populated by a small core of patients led by Harding (Giles Terera), a mild-mannered man with deep intelligence and sexual incapacities.
Into this group a disruptive force explodes, as McMurphy (Aaron Pierre) is admitted as a new patient. He’s been committed after being convicted of several crimes, perhaps looking for an easy way to serve his sentence rather than joining the work farm. Quickly, he and the head nurse Ratched (Olivia Williams), a woman who thrives on cruelty and manipulation, set up in uneasy opposition. She is a stickler for the ward rules; he seeks to rip them apart. In McMurphy’s world, everything is a joke, from fleecing the other patients at cards to his own treatment.
We see the patients – including nervous, stuttering Billy (Kedar Williams-Stirling), chronically altered Ruckley (Ene Frost) – as pawns in a game of survival and struggle. Predominantly Black, their reduction to pieces to be moved in a predetermined puzzle by the white Ratched offers a subversive comment on the nature of power and politics. McMurphy, for all his bravado, is vulnerable within, which makes his story ever more tragic to witness whether you know the ending or not. Familiarity with the 1975 Oscar-winning film starring Jack Nicholson is not required to fully immerse yourself in Dyer’s take.
The 1962 novel by Ken Kesey on which Wasserman based his play is very much a raging incitement against psychiatric treatment by drugs and electric shocks. As the men in the ward fully realize, medication time keeps them docile and tranquilized, while group therapy forces them to face their fears in an unhelpful way. Ratched rules her domain with an icily depraved manner, set behind a sweet smile. She dominates the doctor (Matthew Steer) who is supposed to protect the patients and keeps those patients in line by digging into their weaknesses.
Though One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest tackles serious topics, and is often shocking to watch, there is a strong vein of humour that threads through the drama. McMurphy is a breath of fresh air into a stagnant room, someone who raises questions about why and how the hospital works the way it does.
It does need to be mentioned that Wasserman (and Kesey) offers women as agents of blame and temptation, rather than considering them as rounded characters. Aside from Ratched, we see Candy (Daisy Lewis) and Sandra (Amy Newton), ladies of questionable virtue and morals, while McMurphy’s previous arrest for statutory rape of a minor is glossed over as a natural step for male growth. Elsewhere, wives and mothers offer long shadows that have led their men into the mental ward.
Set in the round, the audience are just as complicit, voyeurs in this squalid exposure of a side of healthcare often brushed under the carpet or dismissed altogether. Ben Stones’s set of stairs, radiators, and tiles works well with Chris Davey’s lighting (often jarring, sometimes warm).
Pierre, Terera, Williams, and Boan offer powerful and layered performances throughout, capturing the complexity and versatility of their characters. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a revival worth watching, while acknowledging its underlying misogyny and attitudes.
