When Czech filmmaker Miloš Forman directed the Jack Nicholson-starring film of Ken Kesey’s tragic-comic novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, he said the story for him was about Stalinism. Modern Britain may not be as overtly oppressive as that, but there are many reasons why one could imagine with pleasure physically choking the people who run it (not significantly reforming the banking system, for example, or sending more kids to Afghanistan). So revisiting the story is always welcome, but the problem with Swedish outfit Bounce’s new street dance version of it is that, like some of those in its psychiatric ward setting, it’s lost the plot. Here’s what remains of it.

If you care so little for the story, why use it at all?

Randall McMurphy (João Assunção) shows up at a mental institute where his free-form street dancing ways bumps hips with the authoritarian Nurse Ratched (Letitia Simpson), who crushes her inmates’ spirits by having them perform a ballet routine everyday. Once McMurphy gets in, though, the inmates are soon following his rebellious ways, granting them liberty while he slowly loses his own.

A potentially insensitive concept in many ways proves to be a neat conceit. The basic streetdance freedom versus oppressive ballet dynamic works (though, after one or two of those petulance-tinged folded-arm poses beloved of MTV pop-stars, more reflective viewers may begin to suspect the experimental hip-hop dance ethos itself of infringing its own constraints upon its partakers, even if such moves are more recently established and hip than those of ballet), and some of the characters are successfully realised; Nurse Ratched’s domineering nature is conveyed through Simpson’s short, sharp and controlled bursts of breakdance, while Billy Bibbit’s nervous stammering is embodied by Robert Malmborg through robotic staccato moves. There’s also a few more or less irrelevant dance numbers that genuinely thrill, while the music choices display an eclecticism not even the phasiest teenager’s itunes library could match, from Cypress Hill’s titular squealing hip-hop hit to the incessant metal twang of System of a Down, on through a smorgasbord of genres including bhangra, jazz, funk and classical. But the group ultimately fail in the basic task of communicating the story; anyone unfamiliar with it going in won’t be less so coming out, which begs the question: if you care so little for the story, why use it at all? Devised and choreographed by the dancing cast themselves, how wonderful it would have been if this communal creativity and power-sharing could have delivered a great rendition of a story about the dangers of authoritarianism (whether or not that’s why they chose the story, I don’t know). As it is, though, it remains a poor way to enjoy a great story.