Tom Stoppard and Andre Previn's play for actors and orchestra is a bold and breathtaking new production which sees a full orchestra take to the Olivier Stage. Entry Pass members Sam Plumb, Lizzie Laycock and Lucy Higgie joined the professional critics on Friday 16 January and, below, gives his take on this rarely staged show.

Though perhaps none of Stoppard's plays will ever match his 60's breakthrough ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead' for its inventiveness, pathos and lyricism, here's a fair contender. This performance of ‘Every Good Boy' has all the ingredients necessary for success: live orchestra, three characters with the same name, and mental-asylum dance-offs.

However, despite the comic elements of the play, Stoppard's tale strikes a harrowing chord. The protagonist, Alexander, partly based on Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, is a sane man in a mental asylum, unable to leave or see his young son unless he admits madness, thus clearing the KGB of their human rights violations against him and his comrades. This injustice is scarily recognisable today, and it's easy to see why the NT felt the time right, 32 years on, for a revival of this tricky piece.

But don't panic; this production soars with the weightiness of its subject matter, rather than clanging into the easy pitfalls of preaching or pontificating. Mistaken identity and Stoppard's characteristic wordplay harmonise with the political overture, as do the Southbank Sinfonia, whose inclusion in the piece as performers rather than simply musicians adds to the surreal and eerie atmosphere of the piece.

An enjoyable and provoking play.

Sam Plumb

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Every Good Boy Deserves Praise Indeed.

Tom Stoppard's Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, including André Previn's emotional score, succeeded at bringing both joy and sorrow to its audience.

At just over one hour long, Stoppard's provocative play is cleverly written and packed full of witty remarks and word play. The audience follows Alexander Ivanov, a Russian dissident, who has been certified for standing up for his friends by claiming that the government are placing perfectly sane people in mental hospitals. He shares a cell with a rather insane character who permanently believes he is surrounded by an orchestra. In order to be released, the prisoners must admit they were ill but are now cured. However, with Alexander's belief being, "I have no symptoms. I have opinions," it's not as easy as it sounds.

Previn's orchestral symphony is superb and as the music represented the mood and emotions of the characters it became like a film score and worked brilliantly with the acting and storyline.

The set was a shock on first glance as the majority of the acting space was taken up by the orchestra leaving only a small area for the actors to work in but the minimal, cell-like set was very effective.

Olivier Award winner, Toby Jones, shone as the cell-sharing lunatic with his great delivery, comic timing and funny face. Joseph Millson also performed brilliantly as the dissident and received sympathy from the audience at all times.

Every Good Boy Deserves Favour is both charming and shocking and with its beautiful melodies and clever surprise ending it's definitely well worth seeing.

Lizzie Laycock

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Sheets of music flying, chairs swinging around at breakneck speed and doubling as weapons whilst people blind each other from behind with black hoods...who could have predicted that an orchestra, normally the epitome of order, could spawn one of the most spectacularly chaotic moments ever witnessed at the Olivier? In 'Every Good Boy Deserves Favour', Stoppard's 1977 satire on the oppression hidden behind a façade of increased liberality in the USSR, lines between reality, illusion, sanity, madness, right and wrong become thoroughly blurred as two men share a ward in a mental hospital: one conducts an imaginary orchestra that we nevertheless hear and see and one is accused of slander against the Party.
 
André Previn's score underlines slapstick moments with jaunty motifs as well as veering to slower, dissonant ones for darker scenes. But the stage seems slightly suffocated when the orchestra is static - despite the revolving platform and path through the middle, it does occupy a great deal of it, forcing the actors into much smaller spaces.
 
The play isn't overtly updated, underlining the frightening fact that it still feels incredibly relevant. Alexander's observation that ‘if your name is known in the West, it is an embarrassment [for you to die]' could have been ripped straight out of a report covering the assassination of Litvinenko. Joseph Millson is particularly brilliant as Alexander, conveying dignified yet rage-filled conviction and charting starvation in his physicality extraordinarily. Dan Stevens is very funny as the Doctor, as is Alan Williams in his brief appearance as the Colonel. The figures of authority in the play are comic but the laughter they provoke is satirical laughter, laughter with knives.

Lucy Higgie