Christian adds sex appeal

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh

What a surprising experience this blackish comedy, this horrifying exposé of life and death in a Sixties American mental asylum proves to be!

The audience came to savour the Hollywood film star Christian Slater making his British theatre debut in a dramatised version of the famous American film, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. After Edinburgh it opens in London next month.

As Randle McMurphy, anarchic rebel and new inmate, Slater cuts a brave, modestly convincing figure. Chicken-pox restricted his rehearsal time and the original director quit the production.

Yet in the risky transition from screen to stage Slater hangs on to some of his charisma and a fair bit of his sex appeal, despite looking overweight when he sheds his shirt.

He puts on a jaunty show of good ol' boy spiritedness and casual sarcasm without yet achieving the loaded charm, mischief and emotional vigour that Jack Nicholson famously brought to the role. When Slater bares his soul there is nothing much to see.

In the circumstances our own Frances Barber virtually acts him off the stage or cannot help nudging him into the shade of second place. Looking like Bette Davis in middleage, Barber, playing that imperious agent of repression and conformity Nurse Ratched, rivets the attention.

Her performance far surpasses the traditional battleaxe with a cutting edge that Louise Fletcher made of the character on film. Barber makes Ratched's wickedness interesting and unpredictable.

Sexual frustration and even desire partially explain the battle of wills and wiles that she and Slater's swaggering McMurphy fight to the end. At first she wears a winsome smile, a voice of aspartame sweetness and an attitude of apparent reasonableness.

Once McMurphy tests the limits of her power and temper, with all his wit and wits ablaze, she changes. Stiff and poised like a cat about to pounce, eyes set in an unblinking glare of animosity, she settles into haughty disdain, as if McMurphy were something nasty lurking in the latrines.

This decades-old stage adaptation by Dale Wasserman of Ken Kesey's novel now seems a thin, superficial cutout of the original. It cries out to be replaced with a fresh version, conveying Kesey's critique of American mental asylum regimes, their resort to electric shock treatment and the mental castration of lobotomies.

The book's narrator, supposedly deaf and dumb Chief Bromden, poignantly acted here with grace and baffled sadness by the towering Brendan Dempsey, needs also to be restored to his central place.