In 1992, Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of the Starship Enterprise were
getting “a little stir-crazy”. The cast had been doing nothing but saving
the universe for five years and they needed a change.
“We said,” Captain Picard tells me, “why can’t we do something at weekends?”
And so they did. The cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation embarked on a
happily eccentric theatrical tour of four American cities, performing Tom
Stoppard and André Previn’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (EGBDF). Captain
Picard (Patrick Stewart) played the Doctor, the android Data (Brent Spiner)
played Ivanov, the imprisoned lunatic, and Commander Riker (Jonathan Frakes)
played Alexander, the sane dissident diagnosed as mad by the Soviet
authorities.
The eccentricity lies in the fact that EGBDF requires a full-size orchestra on
stage with the actors. It’s also short - just over an hour - so the huge
stage effort doesn’t even make a full evening’s entertainment. On the other
hand, as Stewart says, “It is a brilliant piece.”
It is, indeed, brilliant and very, very funny. And so, by some miracle, the
Trekkies persuaded four big-city symphony orchestras to give them matinée
time. And now, by another miracle, the National Theatre in London is to
stage Every Good Boy Deserves Favour.
Stoppard seems slightly bemused. “I was perfectly happy for it to be a
one-off; I didn’t expect it to be performed or revived.”
The reason the Trekkies chose the play was that Stewart had been in what
should have been the first and only production, at the Festival Hall in
1977. It was part of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee celebrations. In 1974,
Previn had asked Stoppard to write a play with music, an art of which,
Stoppard said, he knew next to nothing. “I knew next to nothing then, and I
know very little now.”
Previn, then principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, wanted to
use the full band on stage with actors. “I jumped at the chance,” wrote
Stoppard. “It turned out to be the fastest move I made on the project for
the next 18 months.” At the time, Stoppard was immersed in the world of
Soviet dissidents. He met Viktor Fainberg and Vladimir Bukovsky, both of
them exiles from the misery of Brezhnev’s Russia, and both of whom had been
forcibly committed to so-called psychiatric institutions. And it was their
experiences that finally unlocked his idea for Previn’s play with music.
The Soviets – like, in fact, the tsars before them and Putin now - had the
inspired notion of classifying anybody who opposed their regime as insane.
Far more ingenious than mere torture or execution, this imprisoned the
dissident in an epistemological cage. “I have no symptoms, I have opinions,”
says Alexander in EGBDF, in an attempt to prove to the Doctor that he is not
mad. “Your opinions are your symptoms,” replies the Doctor. “Your disease is
dissent.”
From within the system, this is entirely logical: the Soviet system was, by
definition, the repository of all sanity. It must continually prove this to
its people. “I suppose, what the play is getting hold of,” says Stoppard,
“is the timeless truth that no system attempts to undermine itself. If any
system could be seen as a kind of natural organism, then its distinguishing
characteristic would be to avoid undermining itself. It’s quite a pragmatic
way of governance.” From outside the system, this is plainly stupid, cruel
and insane. But both Alexander and the Doctor are locked inside the system
and cannot get out. People being locked inside logical but inhuman systems
is one of the central themes of all Stoppard’s work - but it is never so
briskly realised as it is in EGBDF, nor so funnily.
“What can I tell you, Bryan?” the playwright says. “It’s my comedic reflex.
When I thought, ‘Oh, I can write about that,’ I thought it would be quite a
good thing if, for once, I were to write something without jokes in it. That
was my first reaction to the thought of writing about dissidents
incarcerated in asylums and so on. But I suppose, predictably, as soon as I
started, I found that I couldn’t somehow write it otherwise, and quite a lot
of it is a kind of strange comedy act between a doctor and a patient, and so
on.”
But then there’s Ivanov, Alexander’s cell mate, who definitely is mad. He is
convinced he is in charge of a symphony orchestra of dubious quality. “I’ve
got a violin section which is to violin playing what Heifetz is to water
polo,” he complains. When the Doctor gives him pills to quell his delusions,
he assumes they are for his wayward orchestra. Of course, as far as the
audience is concerned, he really is in charge of an orchestra, the one up
there on the stage; it’s just that none of the other characters can see it.
This is a colossally literal version of the pantomime “It’s behind you!”
routine. The audience can see something all the characters - except Ivanov -
can’t.
“It’s almost the opposite of what theatre normally does,” says Toby Jones, who
plays Ivanov in the National production. “Normally, actors invite the
audience to see what isn’t there. Here we invite the audience to become mad
by actually showing them something a madman sees. The implication is that
theatre is a form of madness.”
The play is about a particular place and time, and the co-directors of the
National production, Felix Barrett and Tom Morris, have wisely chosen not to
up-date it. The orchestra will be in 1970s-style tuxedos, and we are still
stuck in Brezhnev’s Russia. Stoppard approves of this approach, pointing out
that all updatings lead to unnecessary complications.
In any case, it’s not as if much has changed. In August in Moscow, people
gathered to mark the 40th anniversary of the arrests by Soviet goons of
demonstrators against the regime in 1968. The new demonstrators were also
arrested. In 2007, Larissa Arap, who had written an attack on the treatment
of patients in a psychiatric hospital, was forcibly committed to that very
hospital by Putin’s goons. Stoppard discovered, while researching The Coast
of Utopia trilogy, that the tsars had used the same tactic. In Russia, it
seems, the same returns.
“There are,” says Stoppard, “distressing and alarming instances in the history
of the Russian Federation over the past two years.”
The National production is happening, first, because its artistic director,
Nicholas Hytner, encouraged Barrett and Morris to read some early Stoppard.
“He said, it’s really brilliant,” says Morris, “and there’s more in the
plays than people perhaps thought.”
Second, there is the Southbank Sinfonia, a 32-piece orchestra that exists
solely to take music students direct from college and give them a year’s
experience of professional playing. It was founded in 2002, but EGBDF is its
first really big break. “It’s a huge thing for us. Massive,” says Simon
Over, the Sinfonia’s music director. “For this little orchestra to be in a
co-production with the National Theatre opens up a vast opportunity for us.”
In fact, the Sinfonia will have a much larger part in the play than the LSO
did in 1977. Trevor Nunn’s original production was in the Festival Hall,
which meant the orchestra had to be more or less traditionally located and
the three sets of the play simply occupied a space in front of the players.
This time, however, the actors play amid the orchestra, and scene changes
happen via the mechanism of the Olivier theatre’s revolving stage. This
means new - and, so far, secret - interactions on stage involving the
musicians. The orchestra in 1977 was a character in the play. At the
National in 2009, it will be 32 characters.
If this sounds like farce, that’s because it is - grand, inspired farce. But
the genius of EGBDF is that the farce is both essential to and subverted by
the high seriousness of the subject matter. Everybody involved is aware of
the tight-rope act required by the play. First, it has to be fast and funny.
“Tom Stoppard told us it has to crack along at a certain pace,” says Barrett.
Speeches are riddled with superb gags. But these have to be picked up in a
hurry. “It feels like a kind of catchup game,” says Joseph Millson, who
plays Alexander, “and that’s kind of plausible. You are bombarded with wit,
and you can’t hang around for each one to land. You have to fly through.”
Second, it has to hit you where it hurts. Alexander is in a life-and-death
struggle with an insanity that is not his own – that of Ivanov, who, he
fears, might kill him, and that of the system that would kill him but for
the fact that his name is known in the West. In one long speech, he outlines
the horrific sufferings he and his friends have endured. At one point, the
Doctor (played by Dan Stevens in the Barrett/Morris production) asks him to
say he has been well treated and is now cured of his madness.
“I was never mad, and my treatment was barbaric,” he says.
“Stupidity,” replies the Doctor, “is one thing I cannot cure.”
And, oddly, the Doctor has a point. There is a sense in which his patient is
being stupid. In spite of the pleas of his son, Sacha, Alexander is mad
enough to be prepared to die in the name of sanity.
Millson, when we meet, is halfway through a 2st weight loss he feels is
necessary to play the part. “I have to look the part, as there does seem to
be an implicit understanding in the play of how long he has been in these
terrible places. There’s a kind of addiction to martyrdom in him that has a
bit of glamour in it. It seems quite important to him that his name is known
in the West.”
Though we might wish to, we are not allowed to view Alexander as an unalloyed
hero. Stoppard insists that Sacha’s appeals to his father to do what the
authorities want are, in their way, legitimate. “Although the little boy’s
speeches are very simple, they are supposed to have some sort of moral
weight,” he says. “I think it’s all to do with confusing moral inflexibility
with morality itself. It’s against my own instincts because I’m
temperamentally a moral absolutist in these matters.”
Beneath this harrowing farce lies an unanswerable question: how great a cause
does it need to be to justify the suffering of those closest to you? Or is
there any such cause? And, okay, you’re prepared to die for it, but do you
really matter that much? The play’s exquisitely balanced ending will not let
you off the hook. Stoppard is a great artist.
There is a kind of mad heroism in doing this play at all, just as there was in
the Trekkies’ American tour. But, then, mad heroics have always been a
Stoppard subject; that and the terrible ironies of suffering. At one awful
moment, Alexander explains to Sacha that he smells strange because he is
being starved and his body is breaking down its own fat, a process that
gives off acetone, the chemical used to strip off nail varnish.
“To put this another way,” he says, “a girl removing her nail varnish smells
of starvation.”
Funny, but, then again, not.
