Tom Stoppard was behind on a deadline. The playwright had promised composer Andre Previn a play that would include a role for a symphony orchestra. At this moment of crisis, which even great playwrights face, Stoppard met Viktor Fainberg, a dissident recently expelled from the Soviet Union to the West.
Fainberg’s stories about his years in a psychiatric hospital (a common fate for political dissidents in the Soviet Union) gave Stoppard an idea. The result was a play (Every Good Boy Deserves Favour) where a dissident and a psychiatric patient share a cell - with an invisible orchestra audible only to the latter. Stoppard dedicated the work to Fainberg and Vladimir Bukovsky, another Soviet dissident undergoing forced psychiatric treatment at the time.
By the time the play was in production in 1977, Bukovsky had already been released from prison and was in the West. Stoppard invited him to sit in on a rehearsal at Covent Garden.
