As plays with full symphonic orchestras on stage go, [Every Good Boy Deserves Favour] is probably the best, but was the trip really necessary? Suppose Ringling Bros, had approached our saltatory author with a request for a play incorporating its entire menagerie on stage, would he have likewise jumped, or boggled, or recoiled? The better part of cleverness is to know when to resist it.

This particular farce with music concerns two Alexander Ivanovs in the same enclosure—whether it is a ward or a cell is a moot point—in a Soviet mental hospital. One is a genuine madman, who fancies himself the triangle player in a philharmonic orchestra that he sees and hears around him and whose players he constantly berates for their alleged shortcomings. The other A. Ivanov is a political dissident—actually, merely a truth teller, but what is more maddening to a totalitarian government?—who has been jailed and tortured with painful bogus cures and is now being detained and treated with a mild laxative until he agrees to tell lies and is pronounced healthy and discharged. But neither harshness nor laxatives can wrench a lie from his bowels.

The other characters include the political Ivanov's son, Sasha, who also plays the triangle … and whose orthodox Soviet schoolmistress tries to get him to correct his own, as well as his father's, dissident ways; he is supposed to talk his dad out of hunger strikes, for instance. There is also the Doctor, the psychiatrist "treating" the two Ivanovs; he himself plays the violin in a real orchestra, and the distinction between reality and illusion is lessened by having the onstage orchestra variously represent Ivanov's fancy and the Doctor's reality. This is a relatively kindly man, even though his science is a tool of the regime, and though he fiddles while truth burns. He is also funny, but perhaps only because he is a character in a Stoppard play. And then there is the Colonel, who runs the hospital though his doctorate is in semantics, which might have given rise in Stoppard to a number of anti-semantic jokes, but surprisingly didn't….

Stoppard is frequently described—almost as if the phrase had been coined for him—as being too clever by half. In the case of EGBDF (the title refers both to Sasha and to the musical mnemonic), he is again very clever, but a halftone off. The musical in-jokes are funny, but I cannot quite see the plight of Russia's artists, truth tellers, Jews, indeed entire population, as a fit subject for fluffy farce. High comedy—the kind that, like The Misanthrope, scarcely differs from tragedy—perhaps, but not the sort of thing where we get pell-mell "sharing a dish of tagliatelle Verdi and stuffed Puccini," "throwing a trombone to the dogs," "the Jew's-harp has applied for a visa," and (from the Doctor) "He has an identity problem—I forget his name." Jokes about tyrants are all very well: They do not laugh tyranny out of existence, as was formerly believed, but they do, when cracked by its victims, help a little. Jokes about the victims, however, shared by a cozy playwright and comfortable audience, make for morally cacophonous cachinnation….

As a farce, EGBDF is perky but undistinguished; as a statement about human realities, it falls far, far short of the play by Arthur Schnitzler that Stoppard has adapted for the London stage under the title Undiscovered Country. Let's have that one, and soon. (p. 82)