What made the recent production of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest at The Old Vic so compelling was a near-relentless pushing back against the establishment, or at least a rather repulsive figure of authority. Here, Tinker (Leo Bill), who may or may not have been named after the late newspaper critic Jack Tinker, rules with utter impunity in some sort of institution, but it is not clear (at least it wasn’t to me) why all the patients, or subjects, or inmates, or whoever they were meant to be, were there. Assumed to be a doctor, Tinker does things to the other characters that, to put it very mildly, do more harm than good. The stage directions are quite impossible to be convincing, though this production gives it a good go. A pair of scissors is used to cut someone’s tongue off. Later, the same victim has their hands cut off. (Of course, the actor in question still has everything in place for it to happen all over again the following evening.)
Nonetheless, in scene after scene of brutality, the play reaches the point where the violence frankly becomes boring and predictable. Pauses in the action left me impatient, and at one point, I momentarily thought about heckling Tinker to get on with it and finish torturing whoever he needed to torture so the play could end and we could get out of there. I really couldn’t see the point of it all, in the sense that Tinker’s actions brought him zero satisfaction or happiness. So why did he persist in his sadistic course of action? I left the theatre with more questions than answers.
In terms of production values, it was possible to hear everything, even if some of the background music was, presumably deliberately, jarring, and the sheer amount of stage blood, and its frequent use, meant I found myself getting used to it. In other words, violence became normalised. To use a quote attributed to Bill Bryson, “The pleasant fact is that the British are not much good at violent crime except in fiction, which is of course as it should be.”
On press night, the performance proceeded from start to finish without incident – I understand there have been, in various productions over the years, reasons to pause the performance because it had affected an audience member’s ability to continue watching. Was it a disruption-free evening because it’s not as visibly gruesome as previous iterations of this play? Is it because there’s so much unfiltered online content out there now that audiences have, somewhat ironically in a world of risk assessments and trigger warnings, become desensitised to an extent? Is it both?
It came across to me as something that would have been written in 1968 rather than 1998, the earlier year being when theatre censorship was abolished in the 1968 Theatres Act, so plays simply could be about ‘anything’ without the Lord Chamberlain weighing in on it. Force feeding? Check. Drug abuse? Wahey! Incest? Oh yes. Mind you, the ‘prolonged nudity’, as the production’s content warnings put it, wasn’t that prolonged (‘that’ scene in Equus goes on for longer). Lacking in both plot and character development, there might well be something that others will see in snapshots of the resilience, scale and spectrum of the human condition. Not me. No shade on the talented and convincing cast, but this show came across as avoidable, depressing destruction. And if I wanted to see that in this day and age, I’d have stayed home and watched the news.
Review by Chris Omaweng
I love you now.
I’m with you now.
I’ll do my best, moment to moment, not to betray you. Now.
That’s it. No more. Don’t make lie to you.
Two lovers and two siblings.
How far are they prepared to go to prove their devotion? And will their love survive when subjected to the most extreme violence?
CAST
Tinker – Leo Bill
Grace – Pearl Chanda
Carl – Luke Cinque-White
Woman – Lizzy Connolly
Graham – Jack Riddiford
Rod – Parth Thakerar
Robin – Stuart Thompson
CREATIVES
Writer – Sarah Kane (1971-1999)
Director – Rebecca Frecknall
Set Designer – Madeleine Girling
Costume Designer – Debbie Duru
Lighting Designer – Lee Curran
Sound Designer – George Dennis
Composer – Angus MacRae
Intimacy Director – Ingrid Mackinnon
Casting Director – Julie Horan CDG
Illusions – Chris Fisher
Prosthetics and Special Effects Makeup Designer – Susanna Peretz
Fight Director – Sam Lyon-Behan
Costume Supervisor – Olivia Ward
Associate Director – Roberta Zurio
Illusions Associate – Andy Room
Dramatherapist – Wabriya King
CLEANSED
Almeida Theatre
21 July to 29 August 2026
