ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO´S NEST

godz: 9:30 i 12:30

Director's Notes.

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO´S NEST has been described as the best thing to come out 1960's America. This may be a little harsh on Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan but it is a novel that has endured and been accepted as a classic. Of course, it was the Milos Foreman movie and not least the performance of Jack Nicholson as McMurphy that engraved the story on the modern psyche but the book surpasses the movie in both its complexity and originality. It is the duty of a theatrical production to reach back to those qualities and free the book from the shadow of the movie. Hollywood tends to simplify or edit out the surreal and the political from most literary adaptations, and ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO´S NEST is a case in point. The film omits the Chief's visions and yet they are essential to understanding Kesey's themes. The hallucinations of the schizophrenic are close to those of Kesey himself, whose own experiments with hallucinogenic drugs are chronicled in Tom Wolfe's classic account: THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST. The 1960's may have elevated narcotic and mystical states into political statements but it was Kesey who made the point that the schizophrenic outsider had as much to offer as disaffected youth or Indian yogis. Suddenly the metaphor worked because the hospital represented oppressive society while the hippies and mystics were either privileged students or drop outs, in other words they had choice. Kesey's hospital is an image of society and at the same time offers a critique of how we see its weakest members. The patients are not just mentally disturbed but also a cross section of the marginalized and exploited: the Native American, the homosexual and the "blue collar" worker turned petty criminal. They are not only imprisoned but also emasculated. The Sixties offered hope of a sexual revolution which was supposed to end in a political one (which of course never happened any more than narcotics offered freedom). Kesey makes the point that the institution is sterile, the males on the ward denied their sexuality (especially Billy) and that Nurse Ratched is barren.

Absent from the film is the central image of the "Combine". This may represent the military-industrial complex which to this day bankrolls the American government and seems to fix its priorities. The "Combine" also represents the desire to create the "normal" human, whose culture is trivial or banal, whose intellect is dulled, whose opinions are uniform, and whose imagination and sensuality have virtually ceased to exist. Kesey's target may be America, but the "Combine" has extended its range and in a globalised "culture" obsessed with Reality TV, computer games and bland popular music it's easy to imagine that the "Combine" is with us too and, like the patients on Nurse Ratched's ward, we live by the rules of an institution over which we have no control.

STYLE

It is curious how a novel as hallucinatory as ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO´S NEST has been represented in theatre and film as a piece of social realism. As a hospital drama the piece tends towards melodrama and its characters are dangerously close to stereotypes. It is also rather bleak and susceptible to the criticism that this regime no longer exists. Indeed when we were trying to acquire a straight jacket for the production from a modern hospital their "Head of Public Relations" was furious, not only with our designer for expecting the hospital to possess any but with the play itself! It is true, for example, that psychiatric hospitals no longer use electric shock therapy. The play must go beyond either the realistic drama or the mere allegory. Kesey, for example, was writing about mental illness as a metaphor. The mentally ill are pulled into the present, their hallucinations link their conscious with their subconscious. The Nurse, for example, is not a representative of aggressive womanhood, but of repressed thinking. Each of the patients represents states of being, or awareness. And it is the Chief who is the key figure, because he is able to see the "Big Picture" but Society has decided that he is insane and he is unable to bear the burden of his understanding. McMurphy shows him that he can use his perception to act, to do. McMurphy gives him self respect, which of course allows him first to speak and then to escape. Unless a production gives value to the states of perception of the Chief then the production is untrue to the book - which is narrated by the Chief. Most productions, and the film, have the Chief as a secondary character, ironically they narrate the story of the novel from the perspective of Nurse Ratched and her rational world. We have elected to show the Chief's visions rather than describe them, the Chief sees his visions he does not narrate them to someone else. Theatre demands action not description. The audience should be given the experience of the characters. It is particularly important, in our view, to give weight to the patients' worldview. If they are simply "crazy" then the Nurse and society at large is right in wanting to "cure" them by all and any means. So we hear what the patients hear and see what they see (at least to a degree). McMurphy gives them dignity, sexuality and confidence but theirs is the true journey. His own journey ends in tragedy but he saves them, even though he dies in the process. There is of course a religious parallel here. And whether ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO´S NEST is a mystical, political or hallucinatory story is beside the point it is all of these things. It is surely not a realistic drama about old- fashioned ways to treat the mentally ill. We have tried to represent this in the style of the production.

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bilety:

22 zł