Every Good Boy Deserves Favour

National could afford to stage Tom Stoppard and Andre Previn's lavish 65-minute fantasia on the sectioning of dissidents in '70s Soviet Russia. It opens in a two-man hospital-cell where hunger-striking political objector Alexander Ivanov (Joseph Millson, excellent) is incarcerated with an entire orchestra, which is visible only to his genuinely lunatic cellmate (Toby Jones), and to the audience. Jones, with his squashily expressive head, bears the permanent brunt of the police 'baton' which turned him into a 'conductor'. His performance often outplays the part – Ivanov's speeches leave no string of music-related puns un-twanged, and Stoppard's wit can sound horribly sophisticated when it's smoothly plastered over such brutal raw material. The heavily orchestrated madness of society is what this dazzlingly theatrical metaphor aims to stage. The covert violence beneath it is underlined by the directors (Tom Morris and Punchdrunk's Felix Barrett), and Bruno Poet's lighting, in which the shadow of a high five-barred window sends black lines like a musical stave rippling over musicians and prisoners, is bleak and haunting.