The Hospital as a Two-Edged Weapon in Stoppard s Play Every Good Boy Deserves Favour

Tom Stoppard condemns in his play Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, which he wrote in 1977, the unjust practices of using mental asylums as a tool of punishment for political dissidents. Where a political dissident, Alexander Ivanov, is put in the same ward with a mental patient, who carries the same name of Ivanov, and who imagines that he leads an orchestra.One of Tom Stoppard s original works Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (henceforth EGBDF), opened 1 July 1977 at the Royal Festival Hall, London, and featured in the London Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Shakespeare Company, as part of the John Player Centenary Festival, directed by Trevor Nunn.1 The successful premier was followed in 1978 by an American tour that began in Ambler, Pennsylvania. Published in 1978, it stemmed in part from Stoppard s meditation upon the fate that might have been his had he remained in Czechoslovakia.2 Norman Barry affirms that Stoppard had long been involved with Czech dissident movements (he was born in Czechslovakia in 1937 but his family moved two years later) and his political views were not unknown but he had not let them interfere with his professional work in the theatre.3The idea of the play started with an invitation in 1974 from the American composer and conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, Andre Previn to Stoppard to write a piece that would feature a live symphony orchestra on stage and for which he would do music. Since it was a rare opportunity, Stoppard accepted immediately and then spent the next year and a half searching for an appropriate topic.