The extraordinary daring of Rosehill Players' production of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" left the cast emotionally drained by the sheer intensity of their concentration and the audience in shock. It enacted the primal antagonism between coercive authority in a US state mental hospital, presented by Big Nurse Ratched, and the claims of individual freedom, asserted by the rebel McMurphy, a rapist who found himself a place in the asylum by feigning psychotic behaviour. Outrageous, irrepressible and self absorbed, Roger Wilson's McMurphy found himself grudgingly accepting a role as champion for the patients of the hospital, unable to bear the sight of their humilation by Nurse Ratched, who was determined to make them, as well as Dr Spivey, and Aides Williams and Warren, small enough for her to control.
Being big enough is a crucial theme of this play, and it is dramatically expressed not only by the stature of Dave Corrigan as Chief Bromden but by the intensity of his brooding concentration. Quite by chance, Dave caught the attention of the players when he came to watch their production of "Bouncers" because of his six foot eight inches of height, but it is the extraordinary stillness of his suppressed passion that arrests the attention of the audience, as he stands, supposedly mute and catatonic, weighing the burden of the betrayal and exploitation of his Indian tribe by corporate authority. Not big enough to speak, not big enough to be free, he is stirred to undergo the terrible pain of self assertion by McMurphy's belief in him, his first huge effort being his slow raising of his arm in his vote for the freedom t o choose.
So it is with all the other patients. At first accepting Nurse Ratched as an angel of mercy, humiliating them for their own good, they dare to assert their own longings under the influence of the rebel who stood between them and her authority. Ben Ramsbottom's Dale Harding grows from the weakling who grovels before her in the mental torture of group therapy to the man with the moral strength to persuade Chief Bromden to make his escape.
Director David Simpson challenged the actors presenting the group of patients to imagine with extraordinary intensity the state of mental illness that their characters suffered without once exposing them to ridicule. Gavin Dodd as the stammering Billy, Willie Dodd as Cheswick, Aron Armstrong as Scanlon, Paul McCumiskey as the wildly hallucinating Martini and Andrew Morton as the mute, inert, lobotomised Ruckly, were often outrageously funny, as in the basket ball match where Ruckly was the basket, but the audience laughed with them at humiliated authority.
Clearly horrified by the role she plays, Rose Marian Finn earnestly searches her imagination for an explanation of Nurse Ratched’s character. The horror comes from the recognition of a caring quality hideously perverted. What parent does not know the terror that a child is growing beyond her control and straying into danger? The absolute certainty of her Christian tough love ethic becomes a malignant tumour in her personality. When she allows a thin ghost of a smile to cross her face, standing over his inert body, powerless enough for her to care for at last, she little guessed the power he had set free. For though McMurphy was not God, as she had taunted, he was Jesus Christ in a way, to Bromden, Harding, Cheswick, Scanlon, Martini, briefly to Billy, even to Ruckly, liberating their imagination and belief in what it is possible for them to achieve.
The party was his triumph and the triumph of the production. Candy and Sandy, two enticing prostitutes smuggled in to put an end to the effect of Big Nurse’s ball cutting therapy, set all hell loose in a rave up fuelled by a cocktail of cough medicine and surgical spirit, shaken in a bed pan. Candy, brazenly but sweetly played by Lyndsey Graham, is united with Billy for a few moments of forbidden passion in Harding’s haunting parody of a wedding service that is movingly declared by Sandy (drunk but not senseless, and sexy enough to stir even Ruckly out of his inertia) to be "so damn beautiful" With her wild Indian whoop and compulsive power as a dancer Thelma Atherton made the audience laugh till it hurt, for this is a play and a company that understands that laughter can outlive pain.