It feels strange to have a full orchestra on stage when you’ve come to see a play. Mere minutes after the start of Tom Stoppard and Andre Previn’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour at the National Theatre, it seems incredible that so many directors waste their time staging productions without one.
Stoppard’s 1977 play about Russian dissidents tortured and imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals for the crime of questioning the Soviet state resonates in 2009. Where will the inmates of Guantanamo go when the camp is closed? Will they need ‘treatment’ and who will decide when they are ‘cured’?
For the purposes of the narrative, the orchestra exists only in the mind of asylum inmate Ivanov, cellmate of political prisoner Alexander. The action opens with Ivanov simultaneously conducting and composing: sometimes the music is audible and sometimes the musicians mime. The effect is extraordinary – a glimpse of what it might be like to be Mozart or Beethoven, able to summon such stirring sounds inside your head.
The play charts Alexander’s protests against his imprisonment and his struggle to resist the temptation of release in exchange for a confession of insanity. Joseph Millson imbues Alexander with a quiet courage and indomitable dignity: his handsome face sinks in on itself as he describes the ravages of hunger strike and the effect his stand has on his son Sacha (a moving performance by Bryony Hannah).
The second plot strand is centred around the institution’s Doctor’s efforts to convince Ivanov that the orchestra doesn’t exist – a task complicated by the Doctor being a violinist in a ‘real’ orchestra. Stoppard’s skilful handling of the resultant misunderstandings drives much of the comedy and leads to the final moment of catharsis.
Andre Previn’s music is excellent throughout but it is the presence of the orchestra that makes this production so fascinating. The rows of black-clad musicians are so suggestive of order and civilisation that it comes as a horrible shock when Ivanov loses control of his fantasies and members of the orchestra peel out of their neatly arranged chairs to act out some of the brutality experienced by Alexander.
Musicians are set, sound, cast and chorus in Every Good Boy. If only all plays could be like this.
