Fine asylum theatre

Press, 12 April 1979, Page 4

Fine asylum theatre

By

HOWARD McNAUGHTON

“One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” dramatised by Dale Wasserman from the novel by Ken Kesey. Directed by Penny Giddens for the Canterbury Repertory Theatre Society; Repertory Theatre, April 11 to 21. Running time: 8 p.m.

to 10.10 p.m. With this production. Repertory returns to the exceptionally high standard of direction and performance that characterised its jubilee year — and in this case the achievement is the more remarkable, as it involves a controversial contemporary work, well known from the film, requiring extraordinary feats of concentration from its cast of 23 actors, most of whom are young. The novel is variously taken as tragic, didactic, melodramatic, or microcosmic in its presentation of individual assertion in the face of totalitarian repression. The asylum referred to in the title is an arena for the interplay of numerous present-dav dilemmas. some them deeply

disturbing, others frivolous, others highly comic; everyone has his reasons, and consequently the play is as emotionally exhausting from the audience angle as it must be from the stage. However you interpret It, the acting is highly creditable. At the core, there is Wayne Reeves doing McMurphy, the alleged psychopath, as if the part were just written for him, and extracting equal impact from his bouncy first-act dominance and his divided second-act defensiveness; countering him, Elody Rathgen does Nurse Ratched with a grimlycredible professional confidence, and George Taylor plays Harding, the senior patient, with considerable complexity of feeling. The Chief is more central to the play than to the film, and Bruce Pearce’s pathetic presentation of the physical remnant of the tribe relates very effectively to the voice-over treatment of his interior monologues. Of the rest of this excellent cast, the most memorable are Robert Spigel’s Doctor, John Vaughan's Billy, Mark Di Somma’s Mar-

tini, Don Graham’s Cheswick, and Stephen Ruscoe’s Ruckly. Though accents are not always entirely stable, none of the cast falters in physical presentation. In terms of acting, this production compares remarkably well with the film — these actors have the advantage of immediacy, the director capitalises on it strategically. However, the stage script brings problems in the way that it is confined to a single interior location and to a relatively small number of chronological segments. The process of mental conditioning is here not allowed the latitude that gave the film much of its intense plausibility; compression for the stage is generally managed dexterously, except that two crucial scenes — in which the Chief first speaks, and McMurphy dies — are here taken too fast, so that the full significance is not realised. The act of euthanasia would be more effective if secondary characters were not directly visible; last evening, they simply encumbered a scene which had all the components for a grotesquely appropriate finale. ,