Terry's mad for Cuckoo's Nest

10 April 2012

Co-founder of Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Terry Kinney suffers from stage fright. For an actor, this is bad news.

It struck when he was filling in for another actor on Broadway in a show called Buried Child, directed by another of Steppenwolf's cofounders, Gary Sinise.

"I think it was the character I was playing," explains 46-year-old Kinney. "He seemed somewhat brain-damaged, crushed by this terrible secret, because he and his mother had had this child. Then, his father found out about it and buried it in the back yard. So he was constantly digging things up and in the end he brings in this muddy corpse." Kinney flinches at the memory, but goes on. "I had a six-month-old kid myself and half way through the show I was sitting in a bathtub backstage putting mud on and I just thought, 'No! No! I don't want to do this!'"

Despite this experience of being pushed over the edge, Kinney hasn't given up on theatre. Nowadays, though, he sticks to directing - which is why he's in London with Steppenwolf's latest show, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And, after standing ovations on the first night at the Barbican Theatre, it looks like another palpable hit.

The idea of doing it was first mooted when Kinney met Sinise at college back in the mid-Seventies. Kinney was acting in the play and the pair of them talked about staging it again in the future. But they found it a little antiquated and proposed to the adaptor, Dale Wasserman, that they should do their own version based on his play and Kesey's novel.

"Of course he said, 'Absolutely not! You will never do my play now!' Then, when we went to the novel we realised he'd done a really respectable adaptation of the tone of the book, which is so different from the film. The novel is a roller-coaster ride based on the rantings of a schizophrenic narrator and the film has Milos Forman's sensibility all over it. Forman treats madness with great delicacy, but we wanted to treat the play as a naturalistic opera." The result was incendiary.

"People were very, very emotionally attached to it and each plot twist was like a stadium event. In America we love the cowboy myth - which is the narcissistic anti-hero who comes into town, deposes the sheriff and sacrifices himself for his buddies. But I don't think it's just an American story."

Apart from being celebrated as the artistic spawning ground of such leading American actors as John Malkovich, Steppenwolf is probably best known for method acting. But that's not the way Kinney saw it then, or sees it now.

"Back in the Seventies, we didn't find anything on stage we believed. We wanted to break down the fourth wall and people created this Chicago style, based on what we'd done with a couple of plays. In reality, we'd done these other more elegant plays which were much more moody and simple. In many ways we're the opposite of 'methody' because we jump right in. We don't question. We take the text and pound away until something gives." Kinney can soon be seen in Terence Davies's new film, House of Mirth. He is also set to make his movie-directing debut with Found in the Street, based on a Patricia Highsmith novel. Set in Manhattan's East Village, it's a world where "everyone knows everyone's dogs".

But, wait a minute, isn't this what British directors do? Isn't it our preserve to turn from theatre to film like this? Who does Kinney think he is? "You're absolutely right!" he laughs. "But I like film a whole lot more than I like theatre. When I want to go out and see entertainment, it's usually a film. I hate most theatre, but the worst films I can enjoy. I can watch Dumb and Dumber and somehow get transported. Theatre won't work if the whole audience doesn't pull with it and believe in the same truth as the actors.

"It's a wonderful thing when it works, but when it doesn't - Oh God!" What's more, having worked as a child, delivering posters for his local cinema in Illinois, Kinney's cinematic influences have deep roots. One of the first films to make an impression was Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? "I didn't understand what they were fighting about, but I remember it was a huge, huge deal."

Later, "like everyone in the Seventies", Kinney became obsessed with Truffaut's realism. But it was the rough-and-tumble realism of John Cassavetes's film A Woman Under the Influence that did it.

"After seeing that, we thought 'this could be done on stage'. We thought people would feel frightened for themselves and not quite so comfortable. We didn't want them to be able to distance themselves, we wanted them to feel there was some immediate danger - that the actors might not be following a script." And that was how Steppenwolf was born? "Absolutely."

It gives a whole new meaning to the words "stage fright".

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest runs at the Barbican Theatre until Saturday. Box office: 020 7638 8891.

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