This production is a dance theatre adaptation of Ken Kesey's seminal cult novel, which both depicts the reality of life in the mental institution that serves as its setting and also has the reader confront a deeper meaning: the mechanism of how a dictatorship works: with the infinite evil and cynicism that a ruling power uses to manipulate people and makes them helpless. In the story, the mental institution's chief nurse Ratched, is the embodiment of power, who quite effectively constrains... the patients in her ward within limits she herself has set. In order to make the machinery function, she makes use of cruel nurses and "treatment methods” such as electroshock therapy, but her most powerful means is her own personality. The patients in the institution, different kinds of individuals with different backgrounds, whether there by compulsion or voluntarily, all submit to her. Even those who are able to leave do not escape. Why might this be? This is something the convict McMurphy, who has been brought to the institution for examination, does not understand. At first he is just feigning illness in order to avoid a prison term, but discovering and sympathising with the situation and predicament of his companions, he becomes their spokesman. He attempts to shake them out of their profound apathy, with varying degrees of success, but when he physically attacks Nurse Ratched, it's all over for him. Of his comrades, it is only the half-blood Indian Bromden, known as Chief Bromden, who understands him, and he is the one who implements McMurphy's plan: to escape. It suggests that it is worth - even if sacrifices must be made for it - rebelling against inhumanity, and that human dignity can be regained.
Our production attempts to convey the message - still valid today - of the story through dance, the universal language of movement.
Dance theatre in two parts
A co-production of the National Theatre of Pécs and the Croat Theatre of Pécs.
Presented by: National Dance Theatre
Parking information
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