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.
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