TORCH Players was ever a company to marshal a large cast around a robust play. This year’s should be a joy, the ambitious choice of ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’. Many have read the Ken Kesey novel, many more have seen the Jack Nicholson film.
The play is another entity again; more emphasis on interior action, be that physical or psychological. At 69 O’Connell Street from February 24 to 28, 8pm show, book at www.limetreetheatre.ie
Maurice O’Sullivan directs his company and as his actor/ PRO Katie Dowling confirms, “Mossie enjoys a challenge. This is quite a controversial play and although it was put on a long time ago in Limerick, it has not been produced here in the past 40 years”. Dowling references the “quite significant” differences between the film classic and stage work.
It’s going to be interesting to see how Torch engage with the larger darker play in this text: women terrify and emasculate; society’s pinioning of spontaneous spirit and sexuality; the corruption of equality – intellectual, sexual, social. And of course, there is that wonderful red card issued by those in power – who gets to be classified as insane. The hospital inmates are disenfranchised by every known mechanism, and that’s before a prescription is ever administered.
Scenes are dominated by Nurse Ratched, played by Edel Heaney whose theatre experience holds up to this demanding role: “Ratched is a hostile character who takes control. It’s so hard on these patients in therapy,” and we see and feel their fear, torn between following the rebel machinations of McMurphy (a wild-eyed Micheál Ó Dubhghaill) and Nurse Ratched’s steel corral around inmates and staff.
Torch Players run the show in two acts and are mindful of the sheer busy-ness of the production, “lots of the cast moving on stage and off, lots of dialogue, lots of boisterous characters”.
The award winning team of Tara Doolan on sound and Pius McGrath on lighting accent notable monologues issuing from McMurphy, Ratched and Chief Bromden (John Finn). However there will be disquieting laughs in this darkness and an uproarious party at which “things” come to a head.
Book at www.limetreetheatre.ie and at box office at 69 O’Connell Streeet; on then for Thursday March 5, 8pm at Friars’ Gate, Kilmallock.
