Special to The Telegram

Beothuck Street Players may be a new name on the local theatre scene, but the group is composed of experienced theatrical hands like Clar Doyle, Morris Hodder and Kevin Lewis. Their first production is One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, American novelist Ken Kesey's portrayal of life in a State Mental Hospital, adapted for the stage by Dale Wasserman in 1963 and converted in 1975 into the Oscar-winning film featuring Jack Nicholson.

Based on Kesey's experience as a psychiatric aide, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest dramatises a subject that stirs latent fears and apprehensions: apprehension about mental illness in ourselves or others, fear of the institutions built to confine, treat and control those certified as incapable of living in society. Going beyond lack of privacy, physical restraints or electro-shock treatment, the play is also an analysis of abuse of power in a closed environment with a highly developed hierarchy of doctors, nurses, aides and patients, the latter having their own hierarchy of Acutes and Chronics, Geriatrics and the Disturbed. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is about what people can do to one another when compassion fails. It is also a hymn of resistance against a repressive technological society, in which individuals must fight to assert their freedom and their humanity.

But this makes the piece sound like a pious reformist tract, which it is not. It is crafted with human insight, smart dialogue and comic verve. There are broad comic strokes rooted in the quirks and eccentricities of human individuality, in spite of programs of medication, group therapy, occupational therapy, electro-shock therapy and the whole arsenal of psychiatric regimentation and intervention. Theatrical realism in the presentation of life on the Day Ward is modified by striking freezes and lyrical, somnambulistic and haunting transitions, as the action is played out to the choric commentary of the schizophrenic native Indian patient, Chief Bromden, who conducts interior dialogues with his dead father, as well as being the focus of the struggle of wills between the unruly but eminently sane R. P. McMurphy and the sweetly reasonable and thoroughly vindictive disciplinarian, Big Nurse.

The first act is richly comic in language, characterisation and action, as McMurphy flouts the rules and challenges established authority in the institution. As the play progresses, the stakes are raised. Relations between patients and staff become more troubling and oppressive, episodes become more violent: strait- jacketed shock treatment administered to Chief Bromden and McMurphy, a manic party and mock marriage in the ward, the suicide of young Billy Bibbitt, and, finally, the pre-frontal lobotomy performed on McMurphy.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a compelling, well constructed, and eloquent human drama. Set, lighting, directing and performance in this production do full justice to the power of the text. An expressive and functional set imprisons in tubular steel and black mesh fencing the movement of white uniformed staff and green uniformed patients. Lighting is dramatic and varied, now realistic, now surreal.

Performance is strong from beginning to end, from top to bottom. Heading a substantial cast of staff, patients and visitors are Kevin Lewis as the baffled Chief Bromden, who finds himself through McMurphy, Jacinta Graham as the sweetly venomous Nurse Ratched and Jerry Doyle, looking like Gene Hackman, as the rebellious McMurphy. But it is not simply the strength of the principals but a fully sustained and well choreographed set of supporting roles that create conviction and vividness, with Mike Coady as the stammering, sexually repressed Billy Bibbitt being especially noteworthy.