Every Good Boy Deserves Favour & Professional Foul

Every Good Boy Deserves FavourA dissident is locked up in an asylum. If he accepts that he was ill and has been cured, he will be released. He refuses. Sharing his cell is a real lunatic who believes himself to be surrounded by an orchestra. As the dissident's son begs his father to free himself with a lie, Tom Stoppard's darkly funny and provocative play asks if denying the truth is a price worth paying for liberty.Every Good Boy Deserves Favour premiered at the Royal Festival Hall, London, in July 1977. André Previn's score was conducted by its composer and performed by the London Symphony Orchestra. The 'play for actors and orchestra' was revived at the National Theatre, London, in January 2009.'This extraordinary play marked a turning point in Tom Stoppard's work in 1977: it showed him moving away from exuberant extravaganzas towards engagement with the world's injustice . . . a play that brilliantly counters Soviet iron with Stoppardian irony, and shows the terrors of living in an orchestrated society.' Michael Billington, Guardian Professional FoulTom Stoppard's debut film for BBC television, first broadcast in September 1977, 'was sheer delight' (Daily Telegraph).In Professional Foul, a Cambridge don travels to Prague to deliver a lecture, and to watch a football match. When a former student asks him to smuggle his thesis out of the country, the professor faces an ethical dilemma. 'Plays which enhance civilization itself, which is what this does, are not seen once and laid away.' Bernard Levin, Sunday Times