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Every Good Boy Deserves Favour & Professional Foul

Tom Stoppard

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 Deserves Favour premiered at the Royal Festival Hall, London, in July 1977. Andr? 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 Foul

Tom 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

Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard (1937-2025). His work includes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Inspector Hound, Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, After Magritte, Dirty Linen, The Real Thing, Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink, The Invention of Love, the trilogy The Coast of Utopia, Rock 'n' Roll, The Hard Problem and Leopoldstadt.
His radio plays include If You're Glad I'll Be Frank, Albert's Bridge, Where Are They Now?, Artist Descending a Staircase, The Dog It Was That Died, In the Native State and Darkside (incorporating Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon).
Television work includes Professional Foul, Squaring the Circle and Parade's End.
Film credits include Empire of the Sun, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which he also directed, Shakespeare in Love, Enigma and Anna Karenina.