Every Good Boy Deserves Favour at the National Theatre

Every Good Boy Deserves Favour at the National Theatre

20 January, 2009
by: Joe Harrod

If it's Friday night, I must be drinking mineral water in the lobby of the National Theatre and preparing to enjoy a one hour multimedia performance devised by national treasure Tom Stoppard and virtuoso composer André Previn. Rock n roll. For pre-show entertainment, I watch my booze-addled father trying to stuff his overcoat into a tiny briefcase so that he doesn't have to pay for the cloakroom. Yeah Dad! Fight the power*.

Every Good Boy Deserves Favour is a brief, fully orchestrated study of madness and repression set in a Soviet mental hospital. We meet two inmates. One hears an orchestra playing at all times. He is reckoned to be mad, although of course, we can see the orchestra sitting right there on the stage. Characters practically trip over them as they march round the asylum. The other inmate is a political dissident. He keeps saying that the regime is incarcerating sane people because they say critical things about the regime. Ergo, he's locked up as a madman.

The play is a result of a challenge from Previn to Stoppard to design a show in which the orchestra played a full role. In these terms, it's entirely successful. The Southbank Sinfonia are a dramatic, comedic and interactive element in the staging, with bit-part players hidden among their ranks. In one fantastic sequence a musician suddenly rips off his orchestral white tie to reveal a brown shirt and starts sandbagging female players and dragging them off the stage. Repression and terror bubble out of the orchestra which has provided most of the tension in the build up.

Previn's score is brilliant, from the engaging summery soundtrack of the happily insane to the brooding atonal scrapes of the hunger striker. And the script is classic Stoppard: neat analogies, circular dilemmas and bitter laughter between characters, although the self-righteous dissident is just that – slightly annoying. It's probably a good thing that the play's brisk format doesn't allow him to bang on too much. The mothering school mistress who looks after the dissident's son and observes their similarities is a bum note. She's too much of a device, and this is exacerbated by a weird performance and a seriously odd accent that veers from Mother Russia to Northern Ireland.

Punchdrunk Theatre's Felix Barrett teamed with Tom Morris to direct the action, which is ingenious and disorientating, as a madhouse experience should be. The orchestra are packed onto the rotating stage and a couple of bed frames, a tiled corridor and a desk are put to excellent use. Characters occasionally break the fourth wall to talk to the audience, but they more often break an imaginary wall with the musicians. This device is part of Stoppard's conceit, and recalls the interactivity of Punchdrunk's promenade dramas. It works very well in the context of insanity.

As a political tract, the play is limited by length, history and the fact that all the other elements appeal far more. It really has no impact at this level, except as part of the greater body of post-Soviet commentary. It's a neat study, not an effective polemic.

As entertainment, the play has many merits. It's short, funny and brilliantly staged and performed. There's a slight falling off of interest once the dramatic conceits have been explored and we're left with the 'tension' of a hunger strike, but then the show ends with rather a good joke. A pioneering collaboration of the kind that only the National could really bring off, Every Good Boy is well worth an hour of your time.


* The cloakroom for the National Theatre is free. Production shots by Simon Annand

Check out all London Theatre
Check out Things To Do in London

Joe Harrod