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Every Good Boy Deserves Favour
A dissident is locked up in an asylum. If he accepts that he was ill and has been cured, he will be released. He refuses. Sharing his cell is a real lunatic who believes himself to be surrounded by an orchestra. As the dissident’s son begs his father to free himself with a lie, Tom Stoppard’s darkly funny and provocative play asks if denying the truth is a price worth paying for liberty.
‘Plays which enhance civilization itself, which is what this does, are not seen once and laid away.’ Bernard Levin, Sunday Times
Every Good Boy premiered at the Festival Hall, London, in July 1977. It was revived at the National Theatre, London, in January 2009.
Professional Foul
‘Professor Anderson, a somewhat devious academic, went to Prague to deliver a lecture on “Ethical Facts in Ethical Fiction” and to see a football match. Politics intruded when a former pupil of Anderson begged him to smuggle out a thesis arguing that “the ethics of the State can only be the ethics of the individual writ large.” . . . Mr Stoppard’s BBC television debut was sheer delight.’ Richard Last, Daily Telegraph
Tom Stoppard’s work includes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Inspector Hound, Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, After Magritte, Dirty Linen, The Real Thing, Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink, The Invention of Love, the trilogy The Coast of Utopia, Rock ’n’ Roll, The Hard Problem and Leopoldstadt. His radio plays include If You’re Glad I’ll Be Frank, Albert’s Bridge, Where Are They Now?,…
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