Insane in the Brain is the Swedish company Bounce’s take on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the multi-Oscar-winning film based on the 1962 play by Ken Kesey.

McMurphy has got himself transferred from a criminal work-camp to a psychiatric institution, in order to have a cushier time during his sentence. Once there, it’s clear he isn’t mad. He stirs up the other inmates, who have been kept in line by the fearsome nurse Ratched, using humiliating therapy sessions, painful electric treatments and medication.

McMurphy tries to energise them back into real life, unaware that, if he makes trouble, Ratched has the power to keep him locked up forever. The third major character is Chief Bromden who pretends to be deaf mute; here he is in a wheelchair pretending he can’t walk – a necessary change in a dance version with minimal speech.

This show is terrific fun, but dramatic and moving at the same time, especially when McMurphy tries to kill the nurse in anger at terrible events, and at the end when the no-longer wheelchair bound-Bromden suffocates McMurphy with a pillow, in sympathy, after he has been lobotomised.

The dancing is exuberant and athletic, but these performers can also act, and each character becomes clearly defined as the story progresses.

The stutterer loses his stutter after McMurphy has smuggled in a hooker for him, and two of the inmates – girls in this version – emerge from catatonia and delusional tendencies, after a short-lived, McMurphy-engineered, escape into the town.

At the start there is a whirling dance for the white-clad inmates as the newcomer arrives; the most powerful street dance comes from nurse Ratched’s two sadistic assistants, and the nurse herself moves with a snake-like sliding motion which is fascinating to watch, and puts over her power-intoxicated character with forceful clarity.

Bounce’s Insane in the Brain is at the Wyvern, Swindon, next Tuesday and Wednesday. Box office: 01793 524481. www.wyverntheatre.org.uk