'Favour' Finds Tom Stoppard Production Deservedly So

Author: Allison Quady Arts Editor

"Every Good Boy Deserves Favour," directed by Professor of Theatre Richard Romagnoli, opened late Friday evening in Wright Theatre, allowing ample time for the audience to gaze at the entire Middlebury College Orchestra assembled onstage. With glistening instruments, the orchestra, tuned up and played at their whim. Conductor Evan Bennett's tuxedo tails lay undisturbed, waiting for the moment when he would take charge.

The actors looked incredibly uncomfortable. Sitting with intense consternation or aimlessly wandering with a triangle, Jesse Hooker '02 and Sean Nelson '02 were dwarfed by the spectacle behind them. Forced into such a small downstage position, so close to such a vast audience, with their upstage retreat blocked by many musicians, the playing space mimicked the physical and mental entrapment in the play's content.

"Every Good Boy Deserves Favour," written by Tom Stoppard circa 1978, more than a decade before the downfall of the Soviet Union, is unlike most other Stoppard plays because it was intended for a specific political purpose. According to Professor of English and Film John Bertolini's program note, Stoppard believed less in political theatre as a means to enact a concrete objective, than as a medium for establishing a greater morality from which future political ideals are formed. However, the incarceration of political prisoners in Soviet mental hospitals struck a chord with Stoppard and this play was written specifically in support of their release.

As an audience, we first meet the madman, Alexander Ivanov, played comically and well by Nelson, listening to the orchestra in his head. The orchestra is, of course, present to the audience in like manner as it is to Ivanov, rising upstage behind him. He has only to lift his triangle and the orchestra begins. Guided in theory by the madman, in reality by the conductor, the entire orchestra is understood to somehow fit inside the head of Ivanov.

Having met the madman, the audience is introduced to another prisoner with the same name. The confusion of identity is one of the numerous ways in which Stoppard's sense of humor encourages his political aim. By confounding the identity of the two men we compare the sanity of each and, in turn, the sanity of their imprisonment. Hooker plays Alexander in a straightforward manner, delivering the lines regarding his history and the specific politics surrounding the play directly into the audience. The political agenda cannot be mistaken and is clearly intended for debate amongst the public. As a result of Hooker's focus on the audience while delivering his story, a marked distinction of focus is inevitably made when the story turns inward in working out the relations between the characters. It is a clear and necessary separation between the political and the personal needed for the audience interest and for the success of the play.

The entrance of Doctor carrying her violin, played by Susie Carter '02, onto the stage introduced the impenetrable bureaucracy of the hospital prison system, wherein the doctors were captors not of their own accord, but upon higher orders established for the sake of control and "formula." Carter makes a powerful choice in her role of Doctor, choosing to define her character not as a villain, but as one just as powerless as the two prisoners to change the course of events. With each patient a similar confusion arises about who is doctor and who is patient, once again striking the indeterminable line between sane and insane. Carter has the advantage of being a part of a "real" orchestra. She totes her violin to prove it and rushes off so as not to be late for practice, taking her seat at the side of the stage, surrounded by the same orchestra which has been playing at the whim of the madman Ivanov; the same orchestra on whom the audience rests their eyes and ears. The orchestra plays, uniting the action with their glistening bows in the air; Doctor participates in the corner, Ivanov conducts and Alexander shakes on his bed.

Not all are united, however, because Alexander's son, Sacha, played by Tobi Erner '04 and Sacha's teacher, played by Maria Ostrovsky '02, spend much of the action sitting at the corner of the stage with their backs to the audience. Erner's endearing performance posits an entirely distinct energy on the stage. Sacha solves his father's impossibility with the logic of a child and implicitly commands the adult world to understand the simplicity of what even a child is able to grasp so heartily. Sacha grasps his emotions, which tell him clearly that his father must lie, but he does not grasp the objective rationale of his father, which puts the latter at, "a logical impasse."

As Sacha's teacher, Ostrovsky refutes his logic with illogic resembling the illogical arguments of Doctor arguing with her patients. However, Teacher's illogic is overtly crueler in tone and body language and this excess of malice stands out as entirely different from the mood of any other character. As a pair, Sacha and Teacher are at opposite ends of the sympathy spectrum, the former garnering all of my pity and the latter, none.

Ben Correale's '03 entrance as the Colonel towards the end of the play provided the absurd solution to the problem. A professor of semantics, the Colonel, confusing the identities of the two Alexander Ivanovs, turned to the madman, asking him the one question the other could not answer to his satisfaction, do we put sane men in mental hospitals? The madman answers truthfully, no, and the Colonel turns to the sane man, asking him if he has an orchestra in his head, the answer is no, again. With this brief interrogation, the Colonel absurdly proves his worthless yet necessary existence as a man of semantics who lets the two prisoners free by confusing the facts.

In the final moments of the play, the intensity escalates. Romagnoli holds the tension onstage by using the orchestral space. Sacha winds up through the orchestra with her song, unwillingly distancing herself from Alexander. The final uncertainty about Alexander's fate leaves open the question about the future sanity of Russia.