Every Good Boy Deserves Favour

Only the National could afford to stage Tom Stoppard and Andre Previn's lavish 65-minute fantasia on the sectioning of dissidents in 1970s Soviet Russia. It opens in a two-man hospital-cell where hunger-striking political objector Alexander Ivanov is incarcerated with an entire orchestra, which is visible only to his genuinely lunatic cellmate (Toby Jones), also named Ivanov, and to the audience. Jones, with his squashily expressive head, look like he bears the permanent brunt of the police 'baton' which turned him into a 'conductor'. It's a performance which often outplays the part ñ 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 the raw material of state brutality.
The heavily orchestrated madness of a whole society is what this dazzingly theatrical metaphor aims to stage. The covert violence beneath it is underlined by the directors (Tom Morris and Punchdrunk's Felix Barrett), especially in a set piece in which dancers erupt, struggling with police, from behind the music stands. 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. And Joseph Millson is excellent as the hunger-striking objector, conveying sheer physical frailty and rigid strength of mind. Alexander's intellectual principles are stern: he says 'no' to the state, to food and to his own small son Sacha who pleads with him to confess to being mad so he'll be allowed to come home. Stoppard condenses the arguments brilliantly: the 'Catch 22'-style denouement proves again that the warped logic of state power can be distilled to a sick joke. But Previn's score ñ which fluently pastiches the likes of Shostakovitch ñ does not bring commensurate depth of feeling. Like Stoppard's script ñ and like the mnemonic about the treble clef which inspires the title ñ the bass register of suffering and menace is notably absent.