Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, National Theatre

I queued for this one morning last week at 8.30am, with a thermos of Bovril in one hand and a John Buchan novel in the other. I recommend it. Front-row seats for a tenner – and you feel like you’ve earned it.

I caught the last performance. I couldn’t very well miss it, after so many people told me how great it was. And sure enough, when it finished, and the audience filed out of the Olivier Theatre, I heard it again: “wasn’t it wonderful?”; “beautifully performed”, etc.

Fair enough. It’s a ravishing production, an all-enveloping (the more so if you’re in the front row) total-theatre experience that makes you wonder how Stoppard’s play could ever have been performed without an onstage orchestra. The cast is terrific. The interplay between musicians and actors is well-worked and expressive. But something tells me that, when you watch a play about political persecution in Soviet Russia, your first reaction shouldn’t be: ooh, what a sumptuous staging.

I think the fault – as far as this argument goes – is Stoppard’s. The play is about a sane man, locked up in a psychiatric prison, accused of being mad. The proof of his madness, according to his keepers, is his belief that, in Russia, sane men get locked up in psychiatric prisons. It’s a fiendish paradox, with which Stoppard is clearly delighted. He duly dramatises it in a spirit of jaunty absurdity that eclipses the story's tragedy. Despite the production’s best efforts (there is, for example, a terrific choreographed sequence in which members of the orchestra become torturers and battered prisoners), the play itself is funnier than it is disturbing.

It also has a (sort of) happy ending. The incarcerated hero is finally released – albeit accidentally – to be with his son. Tom Morris and Felix Barrett’s production drowns this conclusion in tears and doomy strings, as if to demand that we weep for all those who weren’t/aren’t released. But their best efforts can’t obscure the ending Stoppard scripted, which lets us all off the hook. And which makes the play, finally, a comedy.

I’m not asking that a play about political repression necessarily whip us into a righteous fury. But Stoppard’s is all wit and too little feeling. We emerge delighted by what’s gone on onstage, but not horrified enough by what goes on in the world.