It's great to have Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre, headed by Gary Sinise, back in town. I just wish the chosen vehicle were something more challenging than Dale Wasserman's version of Ken Kesey's hippy, trippy 60s novel. I applaud its anti-authoritarian stance but by demonising the opposition it scores too many easy victories.
Everyone by now knows the story: the way rebel-outcast Randle P McMurphy, who is locked up in a state mental hospital, takes on the ward tyrant, Nurse Ratched, in an attempt to liberate the browbeaten patients. As a metaphor for the individual defying the system that's fine; but the play, like the book and the film, is every bit as manipulative as Nurse Ratched. McMurphy is, in Pauline Kael's unbeatable phrase, a "jock Christ"; the Nurse, in contrast, is a starched sadist and punishment freak. We cheer the hero on at every turn; but real drama, as Shaw taught us, only occurs when you give weight to the party you like least.
I was also surprised at how sentimental the story now seems. In the 60s lines like "We're doomed to the terrible burden of sanity" may have had a fuzzy Laing-ian charm; now we know too much about the problems of care in the community to endorse the idea of privileged insanity. Wasserman's play, like Kesey's novel, is also stuffed with adolescent sexism: the women are either whores or bullies while the men are laddish gamblers and sports nuts. Even McMurphy's arrest for statutory rape is viewed as a harmless prank. If you want to see how much the play softens the issue of state intimidation, compare it with Pinter's The Hothouse, written in 1958: Pinter's point is not just that we classify nonconformity as madness but that the staff are as much victims as the patients.
Even if the work itself is jokey melodrama, it is ebulliently staged by Terry Kinney and beautifully acted by the Steppenwolf ensemble. Sinise's McMurphy is vastly superior to Jack Nicholson's self-regarding performance in the movie. What Sinise brings to the party is effortless charisma and infernal cheek: when he twits pedantic Nurse Ratched - who in a therapy session claims: "I know you but I don't recognise you" - he becomes the eternal piss-taker whose chosen mission in life is to expose the absurdity of authority.
Amy Morton gets round the hellish problem of playing Nurse Ratched by suggesting she is less a medical Mephistopheles than an inflexible rule-follower cursed by a lack of imagination. Tim Sampson endows Chief Bromden, whose native Indian father was naturally emasculated by his white bride, with massive dignity, while Eric Johner lends the stammering Billy Bibbit, whose mental problems are solved by a quick lay, a touching vulnerability. They show that Steppenwolf remains one of the world's top ensembles even when working on a soft-brained play.
Till August 5. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
