One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is associated in most people's minds with Milos Forman's film adaptation of 1975. Among its seven Oscars was one for Jack Nicholson and his bravura performance as a rebellious inmate fighting the oppressive regime in a state mental hospital. For some years before that, however, Ken Kesey's 1963 novel had been familiar on the American stage through an excellent play fashioned from it by Dale Wasserman. Kirk Douglas had been a big hit in it as the messianic Randle P McMurphy. But the British premiere in 1972 was far from a star-name production. It was put on at the Oxford Playhouse by a group of university students whose talents were widely judged to be ideal for the piece. Thirty-four years on, the same might be said for their successors, who delighted packed house at the same theatre last week with their lucid and gripping production, under director Alison Convey and with a most convincing set designed by Anna Johnson.

As ever with this story, there occurred the nagging question as you watched: How much of it is true? Kesey himself only muddied matters with his comment at the end of the first chapter of the novel: "It's the truth, even if it didn't happen." And some of it obviously didn't. To take one example, the horrific surgical procedure of lobotomy, which plays a prominent role in the drama, had gone out of use a decade before the play appeared.

On the whole it is best to suspend disbelief and treat the tale as a fable of American life in which one plucky man stands up to Big Brother, and encourages others to move with him. Actually, it is Big Sister here; for firmly in charge of the ward and its suffering inmates all admirably presented with their own all-too-obvious problems is the dominating figure of Nurse Ratched, who was perfectly portrayed by Alice Glover (pictured above). All winning smiles and sweet reasonableness on the outside, she is in fact a monster whose determination to do things by the book often it's her book will allow of no opposition.

McMurphy (Nicholas Bishop Villero, second from left below) appears at first to be gaining the upper hand, having tricked his way on to the ward, with no mental impairment, as a means of avoiding jail on a statutory rape charge. That he's a dyed in the wool villain, needs to be borne in mind when his relations with the other patients are assessed. But having led patients to victory over a more generous TV-watching regime and, yippee!, hosted a booze and tarts party for them on the ward the truth dawns horribly upon him that he is one of very few patients who can't walk out when he wants to.