Oxfordshire’s Toby Jones, as he can justly be described having been brought up in Charlbury and educated at Abingdon School, is taking a brief break from his stellar career in films to offer a compelling and well-judged stage performance as a mad musician.

The vehicle for his talents is Tom Stoppard and André Previn’s innovative “play for actors and orchestra” Every Good Boy Deserves Favour which, 30 years after its last London staging, is at last being revived. It can be seen at the National Theatre’s Olivier auditorium until February 25. (Box office: tel. 020 7 452 3000.) The 65-minute entertainment, under directors Felix Barrett and Tom Morris, is remarkable, not least, for the involvement of the 40 members of the Southbank Sinfonia (conductor Simon Over). They supply an only-too-obvious visual and aural representation of the ‘imaginary’ orchestra that Mr Jones’s triangle-playing mental patient character Ivanov believes himself to be part of. They play music that is by turns moving and martial, inspired by the likes of Gershwin, Schönberg and, most appropriately, Prokofiev.

Appropriately, because this drama is set in Russia, the Russia of the 1970s when those speaking out against Soviet oppression were routinely imprisoned in mental institutions. That the only means of escape, very often, was to own up to a condition that the patient (and indeed everyone else) knew he was not suffering from – and then thank the doctors for their cure – was placing victims in a position that could hardly fail to stir a writer of Stoppard’s savage honesty – and taste for the absurd.

Incarceration on account of his opinions is the fate that has befallen Ivanov’s cellmate Alexander. This haggard, haunted intellectual is brilliantly presented by Joseph Millson – a far cry indeed from the series of relishable comic performances this fine young actor has given with the RSC over the past few years.

Bravely choosing death by hunger strike rather than submission, he refuses to be dissuaded from his course either by Dan Stevens’s jargon-spouting (but clearly uncommitted) doctor or his schoolboy son. This much-suffering youngster is superbly portrayed by Bryony Hannah. The scenes at his school, for all the seeming affability of his teacher (Bronagh Gallagher), are particularly revealing of how a corrupt regime goes about its work, as his geometric axioms are replaced by tired and untruthful political slogans. This is characteristically Stoppardian, as are the outbursts of comic wordplay which sometimes sit rather uneasily with the serious theme of the piece.

The violence at the core of the debased political system under scrutiny is graphically revealed in a shocking display of balletic beatings-up among and around the orchestra, during which the players continue to bow and blow with vigour.