By Charles Pamment BBC News Online in Edinburgh

I was one of the fortunate few to fly over the cuckoo's nest this week. The nest being the Assembly Rooms and the cuckoo the show billed as the one to watch at this year's Fringe.

The show has attracted huge interest in Edinburgh

With its third director in place, and Hollywood star Christian Slater finally recovered from a bout of chickenpox, the show began four days late with a public dress rehearsal.

Interest in Slater's McMurphy, his Edinburgh debut, and the rest of the stellar cast including Mackenzie Crook and Frances Barber has taken up more than its fair share of column inches, but now the curtain has finally risen, does the show live up to all the hype?

The expectancy of this audience, a couple of days after the long awaited premiere, is still very high. The majority are curious locals who purchased tickets long in advance in order witness the rarity of an international actor on the Edinburgh stage. They weren't disappointed.

Crowds are being enticed by the presence of a Hollywood star

Slater certainly brings McMurphy to life with the vigour and energy he brought to his early films when he revealed the same anarchic intensity as Jack Nicholson (who also played McMurphy in the Oscar-winning motion picture of the same novel).

This is a role that Slater has always been groomed for, but his performance lacks a certain air of menace and unpredictability. His recent illness may of course be a mitigating factor, and Slater admitted he continued to suffer a fever during this first performance.

Barber is in excellent form as the frightening Nurse Ratchet, but it is Crook (Gareth from The Office) who fits the role as the odd-looking, stuttering Billy Bibbit so well that it is he who steals the show and the audience's gaze. Crook, on the brink of Hollywood stardom himself does nothing to harm his chances here.

Edinburgh's Assembly Rooms is hosting the play

But behind the admirable individual performances this play also tackles weighty and important themes.

The asylum, and Ratchet herself, are metaphors for the oppression of modern society. Slater's refusal to conform, a promotion of liberation and individuality. The suicide, dramatic proof of the casualties when these two forces collide. This is a play that engages and challenges.

While it is difficult to argue with a standing ovation, one wonders how much of that is due to the experience of a little live Hollywood coming to the Edinburgh Fringe. Ultimately one is left wondering whether this is really Fringe.

A Hollywood A-list actor grabbing the headlines at a festival created for the unknown artist. A ticket - when available - costing �15.

It's clear this is a pre-planned excursion after last year's successful blockbuster adaptation of Twelve Angry Men. And with a run already lined up in London's West End on the back of this sell out, the production arguably represents much that is contrary to the true spirit of the Fringe.

And yet, as the sell-out audience file out of the theatre, satisfied and excited by an afternoon with a Tinsletown player, one cannot avoid the irony.

That even the grandest of festival shows faces precisely the same challenges as the student play in the church hall down the road: the ill actors, the directorial fallouts, the tantrums and tribulations. It was ever thus in Edinburgh!