One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Tickets

Director Clint Dyer — whose Death of England: The Plays was one of the defining productions of recent National Theatre history — returns to Ken Kesey’s countercultural 1962 novel rather than the 1975 Jack Nicholson film, and makes one bold, transformative decision: casting Black actors as the ward’s patients. The result reframes the story as an exploration of colonialism, the social structures built to silence dissent, and what it means to assert your voice and identity in a system determined to take both away.

The production is set in the round — part of Matthew Warchus’ final season at the Old Vic — with Ben Stones’ design transforming the theatre into a claustrophobic, watchful institution that reviewers describe as feeling “less like a stage and more like a system closing in.” Aaron Pierre (Rebel Ridge, Garfield) makes his stage debut as McMurphy, opposite Giles Terera (Olivier Award-winner for Hamilton) as the quietly formidable Harding, and Olivia Williams (Mosquitoes, The Crown) as a chilling, composedly authoritarian Nurse Ratched.