EVERY GOOD BOY DESERVES FAVOUR. To 25 February.
London.
EVERY GOOD BOY DESERVES FAVOUR
by Tom Stoppard.
Olivier Theatre Upper Ground South Bank SE1 9PX In repertoire to 25 February 2009.
Mon-Sat 7pm & 8.45pm Mat 27 Jan, 14, 25 Feb 3pm.
Runs 1hr 5min No interval.
Audio-described 24 Feb 24 7pm.
Captioned 23 Feb 23 8.45pm.
TICKETS 020 7452 3000
www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/tickets
Review: Carole Woddis 17 January.
Human dissonances to unheard music.
It would be hard to deny that in the past couple of years, the National have taken some interesting chances in exploring the idea of what `theatre’ is and can be. Katie Mitchell, Emma Rice and Shunt have all pushed the boat out a little further. Now Tom Morris has hauled in Punchdrunk’s Felix Barrett as a partner to revive Tom Stoppard’s 1977 `play for actors and orchestra’.
Performed originally in the Royal Festival Hall with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by composer Andre Previn, it’s a strange hybrid piece – and a short-lived one with only 32 performances - at once political, surreal, fantastic. Its artistic force lies in the conceit of having a 32-piece orchestra - here the young and enterprising Southbank Symphonia – taking the stage as the manifestation of a psychological delusion: they do not `exist’ except within the mind of Toby Jones’s political dissident, Ivanov. Whether this political/artistic conceit works is disputable. Interestingly, Patrick Marber made a stunningly simpler statement with The Musicians, a piece he wrote for the National Theatre’s young people’s Connections programme in which the orchestra remained silent.
For all that, Every Good Boy carries an intensity and timelessness that is ultimately very moving. Its indictment of political imprisonment and psychiatric abuse to punish those who think differently is curiously topical. Even if it was originally inspired by the real-life case of Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, its sense of individual freedom crushed beneath an oppressive, totalitarian regime could be applied to any number of trouble spots in the world today.
In true Stoppard style, there is a bleak, dark humour to it all. He exposes the mad illogicality of persecution and evil with typical gusto (particularly between Joseph Millson’s second dissident, Alexander, and Dan Stevens’ doctor) while Previn’s music, appropriately Shostakovich-like, and Bruno Poet’s superb, slanting lighting, add brooding emotional weight.
If sometimes the competing atmospheres of humour and cruelty jar, the terrible truths uttered by Millson and Bryony Hannah (playing his young son Sacha with extraordinary conviction) and the human cry that finally emerges possess a tragic intensity.
Alexander: Joseph Millson.
Ivanov: Toby Jones.
Sacha: Bryony Hannah.
Doctor: Dan Stevens.
Teacher: Bronagh Gallagher.
Colonel: Alan Williams.
Southbank Sinfonia.
Conductor: Simon Over.
Directors: Felix Barrett, Tom Morris.
Designer: Bob Crowley.
Lighting: Bruno Poet.
Sound: Christopher Shutt.
Choreographer: Maxine Doyle.
Company Voice work: Kate Godfrey.
2009-01-22 00:01:49