Scottish actor Michelle Gomez has stepped down from playing the formidable and villainous Nurse Ratched in the London stage adaptation of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest for “personal reasons”.

The actor, 59, best known for her work on shows such as Green Wing, Doctor Who and Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, had been due to star in a “bold new staging” of Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest running at The Old Vic theatre through April and May.

Directed by Clint Dyer, the production was initially led by Gomez, who is married to actor Jack Davenport, along with Hamilton star and Olivier winner Giles Terera and The Morning Show’s Aaron Pierre.

But on Monday (23 March), one week out from previews beginning on 1 April, The Old Vic announced that The Sixth Sense star Olivia Williams would now be playing Nurse Ratched following Gomez’s departure from the production.

In a statement on Instagram, the theatre wrote: “The Old Vic is sorry to announce that Michelle Gomez has stepped down from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest for personal reasons. The theatre, cast and company wish Michelle well and thank her for time on the production.

“The part of Nurse Ratched will now be played by Olivia Williams and we are pleased to welcome Olivia to the company. All performances are scheduled to go ahead as planned.”

The Independent has contacted Gomez’s representatives for comment.

A British actor who trained at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Williams, 57, broke onto screens in 1996 opposite Kate Beckinsale in a film adaptation of Jane Austin’s Emma. She has starred in films including Rushmore and An Education, and played Bruce Willis’s wife in The Sixth Sense.

Williams will be taking on the role of Nurse Ratched – a cruel, calculating nurse in a male psychiatric facility played by Louise Fletcher in the 1975 film and, more recently, Sarah Paulson in Ryan Murphy’s 2020 spin-off series Ratched.

Stage director Dyer, who worked at the helm of the Bob Marley musical Get Up, Stand Up! as well as the Death of England trilogy, has said that audiences will be “shocked”, “heartbroken” and “bullied into submission” by this new production.

In the play, which runs from 1 April to 23 May, the patients in the facility are all played by Black actors, with Dyer saying that he wanted the show to emphasise the themes of colonialism in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

“[It] was really about trying to embrace what the book was really trying to say – that it’s a comment on society,” he said. “It speaks to every generation because there’s no good guys and there’s no bad guys.”