[Stoppard has] defined the quality that distinguished him from many of his contemporaries as "an absolute lack of certainty about almost anything." (p. 48)

There are signs, however, [in his most recent work, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour], that history has lately been forcing Stoppard into the arena of commitment…. [Every Good Boy Deserves Favour] started out in Stoppard's mind as a play about a Florida grapefruit millionaire, but his works have a way of changing their themes as soon as he sits down at his typewriter. The present setting is a Russian mental home for political dissidents, where the main job of the staff is to persuade the inmates that they are in fact insane. (p. 56)

Beneath its layers of Stoppardian irony, the play (oratorio? melo-drama?) is a point-blank attack on the way in which Soviet law is perverted to stifle dissent…. E.G.B.D.F. rests...