Every Good Boy Deserves Favour

Orchestrated madness is back on stage at the National, where a newly recast ­version of Tom Stoppard and André ­Previn's 1977 play for actors and ­orchestra returns to the repertoire. Adrian Schiller is the Russian ­political prisoner Alexander who has been ­confined to a state mental hospital, and ­Julian Bleach, relishing madness, is his ­cellmate Ivanov, a genuine ­lunatic who hears music in his head and insists he has a full orchestra under his charge. Jonathan Aris is the violin-playing ­doublespeak doctor who toes the party line and tells the prisoner that "your opinions are your symptoms; your ­disease is dissent". The pleasure is all in the staging by Felix Barrett and Tom Morris and in the way that the on-stage ­Southbank ­Sinfonia orchestra, which plays ­Previn's score so expressively, is used as a ­metaphor for the all-powerful and ­labyrinthine USSR itself. The best moment comes in a sequence – choreographed with customary brilliance by Maxine Doyle – when state-sponsored thugs emerge from the orchestra to mug the violinists. By the end of the show, the orchestra is disbanded, its scores scattered to the winds, as indeed was the USSR itself. Despite the bleakness of the story, inspired by the real experiences of 1970s Russians ­incarcerated in state mental hospitals for daring to criticise the government, it is very watchable. In fact, almost too much so. Although the ­production – with ­astonishing ­lighting by Bruno Poet, which offers its own ­searing and ­shadowy emotional ­palette – attempts to make the political ­personal, ­Stoppard's ­amiably absurd and ironic script ­undercuts the ­emotional clout. In 1977, it may well have seemed potent, but shorn of its ­immediate, horrific political ­relevancy, this brief play emerges as a very clever, entertaining and ­expensive joke.