Programme extract for Every Good Boy Deserves Favour

Extract from Tom Stoppard's article for the programme of Every Good Boy Deserves Favour: 

André Previn and I met in 1974 while he was the principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. One day not long afterwards he said that if I ever wanted to write something which needed a symphony orchestra, well, he had one. We agreed early on that we would try to go beyond a mere recitation for the concert platform, and also that we were not writing a piece for singers. In short, it was going to be a real play, to be performed in conjunction with, and bound up with, a symphony orchestra.   

My qualifications for writing about an orchestra amounted to a spell as a triangle-player in a kindergarten percussion band. I informed my collaborator that the play was going to be about a millionaire triangle-player with his own orchestra. At the point where the whimsical edifice was about to collapse I tried to save it by making the orchestra a delusion of the millionaire’s brain. Once the orchestra became an imaginary orchestra, there was no need for the millionaire to be a millionaire either. I changed tack: the play would be about a lunatic triangle-player who thought he had an orchestra. Unfortunately I had no genuine reason for writing about an orchestra or a lunatic, and thus had nothing to write. Music and triangles led me into a diversion on Euclid’s axioms, but it didn’t belong anywhere, and I was ready to call my own bluff.

Copyright Tom Stoppard 2009

The rest of Tom Stoppard's article, that introduces the play and tells of the unique collaboration that brought it to the stage, is available to read in the programme for Every Good Boy Deserves Favour.

Contents also include:Tom Morris and Felix Barrett, the production's directors, interview political dissident Vladimir Bukovsky about his experiences of being held in a Soviet asylum; who’s who in the company and production team; and Simon Annand’s photographs of them in rehearsal.

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