Spark has flown the Nest

You need to be a little in love with Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, or the famous movie version with Jack Nicholson, to squeeze a few drops of pleasure from this stage adaptation by Dale Wasserman.

You need to be so smitten, because this revival of the triumphant 2004 London production, which reduced me to damp-eyed emotion, looks a pallid, shrunken reflection of its old glory.

The problem has mainly to do with casting and interpretation. Christian Slater still plays the mock-Christ figure and gambling man, Randle P McMurphy, while Alex Kingston has taken over from Frances Barber as the authoritarian Nurse Ratched who regards electric shock treatment and lobotomies as weapons of mass improvement for mental patients.

There is, sadly, no chemistry or serious conflict between Slater and Kingston, no sign of the erotic sparks or of the sexual taunting that made the clashes between the antagonists so remarkable last time round.

In 2004 Slater struck a jauntily mischievous and comic note as Randle Patrick McMurphy, who absurdly ends up in a mental hospital ward and tries to bring a little sex, alcohol and high spirits into the inmates' regimented lives.

Slater could not match Nicholson's charm, sense of danger or charisma. Yet he gave such sharp, erotic edge to his conflicts over gambling, recreation and TV watching with Barber's attractive Ratched, who secretly had the hots for her new patient.

In their terrible, climactic encounter, which precipitates catastrophe, Barber's Ratched seethed with fury and almost transparent desire. Her victory over him was charged with sexuality.

Kingston's neat, prim Nurse, with her sensible lipstick and mild manners, musters all the firepower of a flickering night-light. She does not even put on the right, winsome show of reasonableness or betray sexual interest in McMurphy. Nurse Ratched is both banal and evil.

Miss Kingston discovers only her banality. As if in response to this change Slater has lost the cocky zest and humorous energy he brought to McMurphy. His war of words and

tactics with Ratched, a melodramatic battle between Fifties traditionalist conformity and Sixties liberation rebelliousness, expressed in a mental hospital context, has lost its excitement and ultimate pathos.