First seen in Edinburgh two years ago, Dale Wasserman's version of the Ken Kesey novel keeps coming back. Clearly that has a lot to do with the star-presence of Christian Slater. This sixties fable also palpably appeals to a mood of youthful rebellion. But, much as I admired the vigour of the production, I wish I liked the play more.
On the surface it is a hymn to individual liberation and an attack on authoritarian institutions. How can we not applaud as the anarchic Randle P McMurphy, incarcerated in a state mental hospital, incites his fellow-patients to rebel against the ward tyrant, Nurse Ratched? But, by turning the nurse into a manic control-freak who embodies all the evils of a repressive society, the play scores its victories too easily. There is also a strong streak of misogyny in a play that shows the boys' club striking back against the castrating matriarch: it's significant how quickly the supervising doctor forms a clannish rapport with the rackety Randle.
Wasserman's play is comic-book propaganda rather than real art. That much is clear when you compare it with The Iceman Cometh which it strangely echoes; but O'Neill's play leaves you with a real sense of desolation as the pipe-dreamers of Harry Hope's bar discover the flaws in their apparent saviour. And Pinter's The Hothouse, which also deals with state intimidation and punishment of nonconformity, makes it clear that the staff are as much victims as the patients.
But at least this production by Terry Johnson and Tamara Harvey has a resilient energy. Slater, who has the restlessness of a caged animal, catches exactly the bully-boy aspect of Randle and the idea that he is, in Pauline Kael's phrase "a jock Christ". Alex Kingston, new to the role of Nurse Ratched, also does everything possible to avoid making her a pantomime demon: with her watchful gaze and carmined lips, Kingston is a figure who relishes power without sacrificing her femininity.
And, among the patients, there is good work from Owen O'Neill as a fey Freudian haunted by his own impotence and from Paul Ready as a stuttering, mother-dominated boy erroneously led to believe that he simply needs to get laid.
But, although it is vivaciously done, I just wish the play offered real intellectual challenge instead of theatrical comfort-food.
· Until June 3. Box office: 0870 890 1104.
