EVERY GOOD BOY DESERVES FAVOUR
A Play for Actors and Orchestra
by Tom Stoppard with music by André Previn
Directed by Trevor Nunn
Ian McKellen in the role of Alexander
Royal Festival Hall, London
1 July 1977
EVERY GOOD BOY DESERVES FAVOUR
by Tom Stoppard with music by André Previn
In 1974, composer André Previn approached playwright Tom Stoppard with the idea of creating a play that would feature a live symphony orchestra on stage. Two years later, Stoppard found a suitable subject when he met Victor Fainberg, a Russian political dissident. Fainberg had been arrested in 1968, diagnosed by state psychiatrists as insane, and confined for five years in the notorious Soviet prison/hospital system. By 1976 he had left Russia and was working to secure the release of fellow-dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. Stoppard writes of Bukovsky: "He was not a man to be broken or silenced; an insistent, discordant note, one might say, in an orchestrated society."
Thanks to an international campaign, Bukovsky was released in December 1976 and exiled. In June 1977, he attended a rehearsal of Every Good Boy Deserves Favour in Covent Garden. The play is dedicated to him and to Victor Fainberg.