The best scene is "Electroshock", with three wired-up patients twitching to System of a Down's "P.L.U.C.K.", but in general they ditch the story's darker notes and play it for laughs. The gaping trap for hip-hop dance-theatre companies, into which Bounce fall feet first, is to sacrifice narrative to spectacle. The result is a series of technically impressive but dramatically inert exhibition numbers. Issues of coercion and authority are barely touched on, which is a pity, given their topicality.

Luke Jennings
Sunday 20 September 2009

The production is faultlessly designed to suggest the emotional and physical claustrophobia of a psychiatric institution, scarily antiseptic.

Every merry trick is used, from flashing lights to aerialist gimmicks, from talk (not really a good thing here: the super-bossy Nurse Ratchet sounds like a speak-your-weight machine) to a simulated (of course) sex act, and an anarchic filmed interlude while members of the cast invade the stalls, pushing past me with apologies and cheery smiles.

The piece surveys the manner of mental distress, but it is not to be gulled into false pieties or “Oh dear, how sad” sentimentality – well, only in one rather glu-ey incident. The choreography, made by the members of the troupe, is virtuosic, varied in its resources – no trick is unexplored, not even the one with the inflatable woman – and engrossing. Street-dancegives the proper manic energy and muscular urgency to every incident, and the accompanying score ranges, aptly, from Grieg to Missy Elliott and Astor Piazzolla.

And there is the central performance of Fredrik Rydman as the insubordinate McMurphy, who alters perceptions, tears at the fabric of the institution, lets in air and light and disruptive life. Like Jack Nicholson in the film, Rydman is a force of nature.

He has zany charm, impeccable comic resource, and a dance-manner that commands huge respect. He inhabits his role with an entire naturalness: it seems a second skin. He beguiles us, as he beguiles his fellow-inmates, the bravura of hip-hop his natural voice. Not a performance to miss. Not, indeed, an entertainment to miss. Played and staged by its cast with not a trick fluffed, it is a fine and Swedish thing.

Rating: 4/5

Clement Crisp
September 18 2009

Ken Kesey’s allegorical novel existed as a play by Dale Wasserman and an Oscar-winning film by Milos Forman before Bounce got hold of it and, through a careful process of nipping and tucking from all three sources, it has evolved into explosive entertainment.

While some liberties have been taken in the process – I fail to recollect an Eighties disco dance sequence featuring in the original – the essential elements of the story are present.

Rebel McMurphy (Fredrik “Benke” Rydman) is the new inmate at a mental institution who liberates his fellow patients from the harsh regime of Nurse Ratched (Lisa Arnold). As the story slides from comedy to tragedy, vignettes are played out to a surprisingly agile soundtrack.

Aside from the usual suspects such as Dizzee Rascal and Missy Elliott, the music stretches from Gotan Project to Grieg, the anarcho-metal of System Of A Down to the banghra beats of Panjabi MC. The introductory dialogue scene is unwise, given that few of the cast can “act” in the conventional sense but it is a momentary aberration.

Once they are up and showing off their moves, either individually or in well-drilled unison, the performers are unstoppable. A superbly choreographed scene on a series of beds is driven by breathtaking lighting cues; a dangerous-looking dance on the tilted wall at the centre of the stage combines the shocking savagery of ECT with the elastic plummeting of wire-jumping.

Best of all is the B&W movie watched by the escapees who take their places among the audience: an inspired combination of silent comedy and an Edwardian drawing-room drama in which a trio of tramps challenges bourgeois homeowners to a breakdance duel.

There is a welcome burst of humour during Billy’s (Robert Malmborg) dream, just before he is liberated from his stuttering virginity, involving a dancing blow-up sex doll and theatrical effects hijacked from Prague’s Black Light Theatre tradition.

Billy’s relapse at the merciless hands of Nurse Ratched might be more clearly defined but the wounding, low-key finale is entirely in keeping with the spirit of Kesey’s original. Yes, it really does work.

VERDICT 4/5

Neil Norman
Saturday September 19,2009

The night sequence, involving a simple set of clinically stark beds and myriad complex lighting shifts, is inspired. What starts off as an obsessive compulsive ritual of movements for one dancer - checking the length of the bedposts with the forearm, tapping the end of the bed repeatedly - becomes a whirlwind of crazed insomniac gestures for all four. The darting lights seem to catch them in their manic repetitions like the sporadic checks on a late night ward round. They rebound off their mattresses with the enthusiasm of toddlers on trampolines, their bodies fizzing with energy.

The only criticism is that the minimal dialogue at the beginning is poorly-paced and stilted.

From the later trippy party scene, in which the patients binge on a cocktail of alcohol and pills, emerges Miss Martini’s drug-induced fantasy dance - a tribute to Flashdance set to Michael Sembello’s Maniac. As random as this dance seems initially, all is forgiven within 30 seconds as Jenny Widegren powers through the number with the body of an eighties supermodel and the mesmerising freedom of a natural-born dancer.

Poignant, yet never sentimental, Insane in the Brain is utterly nuts but wholly invigorating.

Sarah Wilkinson
Wednesday 16 September 2009

And what better way to present ECT than to string up your victims on bungee ropes against the set wall, crank System of a Down up loud and go crazy, mingling shades of parkour with tumbling hip hop and frazzled popping and locking? Therapy to Dizzee Rascal is compulsively chaotic and the sequeway into Flashdance's Maniac for the bladder troubled Miss Martini is genius. But it's not all high tempo. Tragic Billy's first sexual encounter is sizzling hot as his stuttering shyness is overcome by sexpot Candy and the final powerful scene, to winsome strings, is stripped right back. OK, they skipped presenting a lobotomy live on stage but Chief's escape through the glowing window leaves the bowled over audience with a flicker of hope.

The show is brilliantly staged and awesome to watch, yet still hits hard with the issues at play in the story - those of power and madness, institutionalisation and treatment and just what makes someone insane anyway. Even those who shrink from the prospect of a 'dance show' should banish their prejudices and pop their dance cherry with this one. We defy you to sit still during this rambunctious yet moving mix of hip hop dance, storytelling and straight up holler for it entertainment from this audaciously energetic Scandinavian collective. Diversity, take note.

The Bounce street dance company totally pulled it off in their stage production of the Ken Kesey novel, which famously became the Oscar-winning film that saw Jack Nicholson bouncing off the walls in his critically acclaimed role of Randall P. McMurphy, and this version was electrifying from start to finish.

The talented dancers roared through the performance, like out of control juggernauts, injecting humor, passion and sharp choreography.

Clever set changes and recognisable tunes from the likes of Dizzee Rascal and Cypus Hill kept the energy levels up for the entire show, in what can only be described as an institutionalized masterpiece.

You'd be Insane to miss it!

Larry Meyler
16 Sep 2009

The title, Insane in the Brain, is the clue to the general outlook of the performance, which translates a would-be tragic melodrama into undemanding light entertainment with mild street dance and a big metal set. Little here about proper strenuous dance, and too much about bad acting. But it does have two clever theatrical coups that I’m quite glad I saw and I’m going to have to reveal at the end of this.

Kesey’s story (which he invented after having an LSD trip when working as a hospital orderly) tells a make-'em-laugh-make-'em-cry story of a lively maverick penned up for dubious reasons inside a mental hospital run on a sedation regime by a tyrannical matron, and then lobotomised into submission when he shows his fellow patients a bit of normal raunchy fun.

The Bounce collective apparently take this as a cue for a holiday camp treatment, but they lack Hattie Jacques for Nurse Ratched and Kenneth Williams for McMurphy. Laugh at lunatics, suicide, lobotomy and murder by all means, I'd say, but make it satirical or grotesquely funny, or do it the opposite way as a surreal horror story.

Bounce do neither, just some school-level laughs mostly, and last night's mainly young audience were fairly subdued. I wondered how many of them had seen the fearsome Louise Fletcher wearing down Jack Nicholson in the Milos Forman film of 1975. The choice for the Nurse Ratched part here was woeful, fumbling her dancing and pitching the part uncertainly as a sort of comic housemother. The b-boying of the lead man Fredrik Rydman isn’t great either, and he gives McMurphy goofy grins but no character.

Street dance is a haunted area of dance; like tap dance, it needs its murky street bloodline to be poking out of the performance or else it’s little more than tumbling, and Bounce’s energetic but not specially sharp routines to the usual ear-crunching thumping, Lionel Ritchie, Edvard Grieg and even a ballet barre - bizarre - come across as weirdly pointless.

Fetching blonde Jennie Widegren lights up the show, as a patient who won’t stop dropping her trousers. (As well as being the best dancer to watch, she also wears a very little pink swimsuit to stunning effect, particularly seen from behind, in a dream disco sequence.)

Then there are those two highlights, first a funny cut in action to a silent movie made by the crew, playing burglars in a snowbound mansion in Edwardian times, where there is a fine krumping battle between themselves and the mister in tails and missus in her bun and bustle.

This is trounced by the coup de théâtre of the ECT treatment of the escapees, with them bouncing dangerously on bungee ropes high against the wall while Ratched and her two ward assistants stomp about on the ground below, the lot assailed by demonic blasts of light (lighting by Palle Palmé). Very flat, the rest.

Ismene Brown
Wednesday, 16 September 2009