Every Good Boy Deserves Favour

Synopsis

A play for actors and orchestra. I assure you there is not much in it. Taken as a whole, the sane are out there and the sick are in here. For example, YOU are here because you have delusions, that sane people are put in mental hospitals. A dissident is locked up in an asylum. If he accepts that he was ill, has been treated and is now cured, he will be released. He refuses. Your opinions are your symptoms. Your disease is dissent. Sharing his cell is a real lunatic who believes himself to be surrounded by an orchestra. As the dissident’s son begs his father to free himself with a lie, Tom Stoppard’s darkly funny and provocative play asks if denying the truth is a price worth paying for liberty.

Our Review:

19 January 2009

Tom Stoppard wrote his play for actors and orchestra in 1977 at the suggestion of Andre Previn, who said he had an orchestra. (He did have an orchestra, it was the London Symphony.) The resultant short play, directed by Trevor Nunn, was a meditation on madness, music and incarceration in a Russian psychiatric hospital, where two prisoners share a cell.

Even six years after the premiere, Alexander Solzhenitzyn, the exiled dissident writer, told Bernard Levin that he never expected to return to his mother country. It is a sad mark of the way the world is that, long after the dissolution of Communism, the terror contained in the comedy of Stoppard’s conceit – the two prisoners are a madman with an imaginary orchestra and a writer convicted of “slander” – still reverberates.

I never thought I’d see the play again, and now that I have I’m not sure I needed to. The revival by Felix Barrett, artistic director of Punchdrunk, and Tom Morris, the NT associate director who i...

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Latest User Review

Claire - 23 March 2009:

Incredible. Stoppard is a genius. The director's interpretation includes an active role for the orchestra complete with dancing and stunts which heightened the emotional experience for the audience.Politically relevant and engaging with humor that underlined rather than detracted from the overall seriousness of the play....

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