“The Play Is Examining The Crunch Between What Society And The State Determine You To Be And Your View Of Yourself”: Giles Terera On One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

Dovetailing a raucous run in Oh, Mary! into the meditative stage revival of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the Olivier winner continues to be one of London theatre’s most piercing storytellers.

It’s the first sunny day of the year, at least by English standards, pre-spring equinox. You wouldn’t be able to tell from inside London’s Old Vic Theatre, as scaffolding shields the Victorian building’s windows. Nonetheless, Giles Terera has a vibrancy about him, partly because it’s the first day he’s been able to see the storied venue’s new stage configuration, for its next production, in which he’ll star. “We’re in the round, and so the audience will really feel a part of the play,” he tells me backstage before rehearsals. It’s a fittingly panopticon layout for the fourth show of the season, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The cast will be at the very heart of the space, surrounded by their captive audience who are forced to switch off from their phones and the outside world as Terera and his castmates grapple with themes of mental health, identity and self-determination, away from social media.  

Dressed in quintessential theatre-kid attire – black Hugo Boss jeans, a crisp black button-down, and black trainers – the MBE-awarded actor already has a string of iconic roles on the West End under his belt. There was his Olivier-winning turn as Aaron Burr in Hamilton, General Buck Turgidson in Dr Strangelove, and leading parts in many Shakespearean classics. Grown-up Gen-Z audiences may also recognise him from children’s TV favourite, Horrible Histories. 

Parallel to his current rehearsals, he’s also finishing his run as Mary’s husband (aka President Abraham Lincoln) in the West End debut of the hilariously depraved, Oh, Mary! “It’s a beautiful piece,” Terera says about the show, which left fingers and tongues wagging on both sides of the Atlantic. “The company is great – which is important to me – and audiences love it. There are lots of surprises in the plot. When audiences don’t know anything going in, it’s really satisfying because that’s when they get the most out of it.” He’s enjoying chatting to audience members after the show and hearing their reactions. However, the play’s short, hour-and-a-half run with no interval means he’s equally revelling in finishing up by nine and clinching a healthy night’s sleep before rehearsals for Cuckoo’s Nest the next morning. 

This new staging of the play – adapted by Dale Wasserman from the 1962 novel of the same name, prior to becoming a 1975 Oscar-winning big screen classic – is already creating a buzz when we meet five weeks from opening night. It’s the first London production in over twenty years and the first where all the inmate characters are African-American. Terera will play Dale Harding, the well-educated inmate at Oregon Psychiatric Hospital, ashamed of his innate effeminacy and repressed homosexuality. He will be directed by lauded auteur Clint Dyer, noted for being the first Black director of Othello at a major UK theatre (The National), where Terera also played the iconic leading role. “Clint and I have done maybe five or six things together. We know and trust each other. He always has a concrete vision which I can key into.” The two have a symbiotic relationship, having both acted together and directed each other in various projects. “I was in Tesco, or something and Clint called me – whenever he calls, I always answer – and he said, ‘Cuckoo’s Nest. That’s what I’m doing next. Look at this character.’” And I said, ‘Yep. Normally with him I’ll just be like, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it.’”

For the past week, the cast and crew have been doing table work at a rehearsal space in Oval, binge-studying the text. “We look at the play, go scene-by-scene, line-by-line, and make sure everyone is in accord with the plot and the character’s actions. It’s been a bit of a static process, but it’s really interesting because you’re meeting all these new people for the first time and hearing their thoughts.” Terera’s castmates on this production include Mufasa’s Aaron Pierre as change-inducing, rebellious patient Randle McMurphy and The Crown’s Olivia Williams as the authoritarian Nurse Ratched. Terera already had to learn how to play the card game pinochle for the role. However, it’s not the largest of asks when you consider he borrowed a double bass from the National Theatre’s music department to get to grips with the daddy of the strings section ahead of a revival of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. 

Through the reading process, Terera has slowly begun to shape his Dale. He doesn’t remember when he first encountered One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. “It’s just one of those classics you’ve of course seen,” he muses. However, coming into this production, he decided to read the play and novel and learned just how different they are from the film. “I was getting a lot more from it than from the movie, especially with Dale and Chief Bromden.” The latter character has selective mutism, but unlike in the movie, he acts as the narrator of the novel and the play, with all the action presented through him. 

Despite being staged in London, the play will remain set within Oregon and the specific cultures, laws and understandings of mental health and identity of that time and place. In preparation, Terera did a lot of research and is using this to shape his characterisation, as well as his work with costume designers to hone Dale’s look. Getting involved with the costuming is something Terera has woven into his craft since working with the “genius”  double Oscar-winning costume designer Paul Tazewell on Hamilton, famed most recently for his outfitting of the screen adaptation of Wicked.  This research led the team to create nuanced, small details in the inmate’s uniform. “Dale is an educated man, but in an institution like this, how much choice can he have in terms of his appearance, and how can that reflect?” 

While context is important to his job, Terera believes that “at the end of the day, you want to come down to the universal element of Dale.” To do this, like with all the roles he plays, Terera makes notes of what comes to mind as he reads the source material. “I jot down anything it provokes, whether that’s music, art, colours. It could be real people or fictional characters. I like to not limit myself. Then, as we get closer to rehearsals, I’ll narrow it down.” He hasn’t formed his Dale playlists just yet, but opera is where his ears have intuitively drifted, as well as to Nina Simone. “She famously had very specific mental health issues that she struggled with, and yet was able to create this extraordinary music. She has this great lucidity and articulacy and, at the same time, she’s connected to what she’s trying to say spiritually and that which can’t really be explained.” He finds the corporeal impact of music to be a useful character hook to offset his research. 

A lot of Terera’s notes on Dale actually point to something more personal. In embodying someone grappling with their identity, surrounded by people telling them who they are, it made Terera think about how he himself has been in that situation: who he may have made assumptions about previously and his own relationship with masculinity and effeminacy. “The play is examining the crunch between what society and the state determine you to be and your version of how you view yourself. I noticed that he mentions God quite a few times, and growing up in a Christian household, I was very aware of the church and the position it held within our community. The conflict around what a religion says about how you should live is something I can really connect to.” Terera hopes the play will act as a playground for deciphering the audience’s own beliefs away from social media and online forums. Exploring Dale’s navigation of masculinity, away from internet noise, feels especially pertinent given the contemporary dialogue on the subject that has been corroding corners of the virtual world in the 2020s. “There are some great lines in the book about what society thinks you should be doing and the consequences of that conflict we see play out here,” Terera adds. “If you’re not allowed to be your authentic self, bad things happen. Hopefully, the play can help audiences have those conversations within their own lives.”

Those who have seen Oh, Mary! will know that there is an obvious similarity between Mary’s husband and Dale; however, Terera remains coy about this in order to avoid spoilers for the former. “It’s interesting having those two worlds, even though the plays are nothing alike, really, but there are parallels. Even with Mary. She’s saying I’m deciding who I am even if the world around me is saying no.” However, in Oh, Mary! these topics have the lightness and campness of cabaret. Here, they are covered far more soberly. I ask how, after years of playing so many tragic figures, he’s learnt to confine those heavier mental states to the stage. “You have to, otherwise it can be quite dangerous,” he shares, clearly not a fan of method acting. “The tools we use at work are our thoughts and feelings, and it can be very easy to blur those lines. Sometimes I might stay in my dressing room for 10 minutes post-show to properly calm down or listen to music. You need a warm down.”

He argues that if a piece is written well, then you can leave behind that loaded mindset with the play’s natural catharsis (a form of writing derived from the ancient Greeks and often used by Shakespeare, where the emotions are built up and then purged to give the audience a sense of release). As a regular performer of The Bard’s work, Terera understands the importance of catharsis for the audience too, and argues the stage is one of the few places left in the world where people can get that release safely and comfortably. “The beautiful thing about theatre is that the play lives within the audience’s imagination, heart, spirit, eyes and mind. Regardless of what we’re doing, they’re receiving it in 2026 with their own filters and life experiences. There is a strong potential with this play to think about what you’re seeing and how it relates to your life.” 

This is why Terera loves his job: its ability to spark conversation. With One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s ensemble of inmate and prison guard characters, the audience gets to hear multiple perspectives and decide what they agree with without being judged or pressured. Being in the round will only heighten their immersion into the experiences of others, meaning there’s plenty of conversation to be had. “Whatever your thoughts and feelings, you should be allowed to have them,” he concludes, “to live with and talk about them in the interval or after with the people you came with. Or with complete strangers – theatre can do that.” 

Giles Terera is appearing in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at The Old Vic from 01 Apr-23 May 2026.