Every Good Boy Deserves Favour & Professional Foul

(, Main)

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Description

Every Good Boy Deserves Favour
A 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 premiered at the Festival Hall, London, in July 1977. It was revived at the National Theatre, London, in January 2009.

Professional Foul
'Professor Anderson, a somewhat devious academic, went to Prague to deliver a lecture on 'Ethical Facts in Ethical Fiction' and to see a football match. Politics intruded when a former pupil of Anderson begged him to smuggle out a thesis arguing that 'the ethics of the State can only be the ethics of the individual writ large' . . . Mr Stoppard's BBC television debut was sheer delight.' - Richard Last, Daily Telegraph

'Plays which enhance civilization itself, which is what this does, are not seen once and laid away.' - Bernard Levin, Sunday Times

Professional Foul was first shown on BBC TV in September 1977.

Author Bio

Tom Stoppard was born in 1937 in Czechoslovakia. His early years were spent in Singapore, India and, from 1946, England, after his mother married an officer in the British Army. Leaving school at seventeen, Stoppard worked as a reporter in Bristol, before moving to London to work as a theatre critic and feature writer. During this period he began to write plays for radio and for the stage and published his only novel, Lord Malquist and Mr Moon.His first major success, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, was produced in London in 1967 at the Old Vic after critical acclaim at the Edinburgh Festival. Subsequent plays include Enter a Free Man, The Real Inspector Hound, Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (with Andre Previn), After Magritte, Dirty Linen, The Real Thing, Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink and The Invention of Love.