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    Night and Day
    Night and Day
    Night and Day
    Ebook135 pages1 hour

    Night and Day

    By Tom Stoppard

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Tom Stoppard’s stimulating, funny play Night and Day is set in a fictional African country, Kambawe, which is ruled by a leader not unlike Idi Amin. The nation is faced with a Soviet-backed revolution which quickly brings newsmen from around the world to cover the story. Using the characters Ruth; her husband, Geoffrey Carson, a mine owner; an Australian veteran reporter, Dick Wagner; and an idealistic young journalist, Jacob Milne, Stoppard pits the ideal of a Free Press against that of working-class solidarity. During the course of the play, each character is given an opportunity to make his case heard as the revolution unfolds. More traditional in style than most of Stoppard’s oeuvre, Night and Day is a provocative and funny look at exploitation and corruption, journalistic ethics, freedom of the press, and marital infidelity.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGrove Press
    Release dateDec 18, 2018
    ISBN9780802146786
    Night and Day

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    • 3/5
      Not one of Stoppard's best, but still a decent work. A coup in a (fictional) African country brings out the reporters, who congregate at the house of a local businessman. The dictator of the company shows up, because he and the businessman share a common interest in keeping the mines from falling into the hands of the rebels. The real story here is not the coup, but the news. What is the role of newspapers? Ideas are discussed and explored, as each character has his say on the role of newspapers, most of it cynical. I think this might play better than it reads.

    Book preview

    Night and Day - Tom Stoppard

    THE SET

    An empty stage with a cyclorama, representing the open air, and a living room share the stage in various proportions, including total occupancy by the one or the other. Thus, the living room is mobile. Herewith, a few dogmatic statements tentatively offered. The play begins with the empty stage (possibly a low skyline in front of the cyclorama). The room makes its first appearance by occupying about half the stage, the rest of the stage becoming garden. For Alastair’s entrance the room moves further round into view, leaving a corner of garden. The first act ends with a reverse transition to the empty stage. The second act presents the room in its position of total occupancy of the stage. There is, however, a limiting factor; we have to have a good view of the interior of an adjoining room, an office-study, which contains a telex machine. We see the machine through the door of the study, when the door is open; and the door can also shut it out of our view. When we first encounter the living room, the study door being open, we can see that the telex machine is operating, that is, the paper stuttering out of the machine. After Alastair’s entrance, our view of the machine does not have to be so direct. But, again, when the room is in its Act Two position we need a clear view of a man sitting at the telex. The telex is like a large modern typewriter, on a desk. It has to be ‘practical’ and operate on cue.

    We are in a fictitious African country, formerly a British Colony. The living room is part of a large and expensive house. The furniture is European with local colour. It looks comfortable and well used. Essentials include a telephone, marble-topped table or sideboard with bottles and glasses on it, and a large sofa. The verandah also has suitable furniture on it, including a small table and a couple of chairs at the downstage end. The garden will contain at least one long comfortable cane chair. The room should seat five people comfortably, possibly around a low table. This furniture might well be in a shallow well, so that people entering the room from further inside the house, or from the study, do so from a good vantage. The room could be connected with the rest of the house through a door, more likely double-doors, or it might continue out of sight into the wings.

    The first act—after the prologue—starts just before sunset, the last rays illuminating the garden; twilight follows quickly on this, and darkness has overtaken the play by the time of Ruth’s second entrance.

    ACT ONE

    African sunset.

    An open, empty stage, the frame perhaps broken by the branch of a tree. There may be a low skyline but not necessarily. The ‘cyc’ looks very beautiful. The sun is nearly down. The sky goes through rapid changes towards darkness.

    A distant helicopter is heard approaching. By the time it reaches ‘overhead’, darkness has fallen and there is moonlight.

    Helicopter very loud. Shadow of blades whirling on the floor of the stage. Violent shaking of foliage. A spotlight from the helicopter traverses the stage. It disappears. A jeep drives on to the stage with its headlights on. Not much can be seen in the darkness. Two or three people in the jeep. GUTHRIE is one of the passengers. The jeep turns into the audience so one can only see headlights.

    By the time the jeep appears, a machine-gun has started up. The noise is all very loud—helicopter and machine-gun. The jeep probably isn’t audible. Someone—Guthrie—shouts something about the lights, and the jeep’s headlights are turned off. The jeep hasn’t stopped moving. It is turning in a circle. The spotlight comes back and sweeps across the jeep. Guthrie jumps out of the jeep and runs. He doesn’t leave the stage. He just runs out of the light. The light loses the jeep. The jeep goes. Guthrie crouches in a down-stage corner. He is shouting but it is hard to catch. He is shouting ‘Press! Press! You stupid fuckers!’ Then the spotlight finds him. He stands up into the light with his arms spread out, shouting. The gun is firing bursts. He moves away from the corner. A burst catches him and knocks him over.

    A late afternoon light reveals Guthrie stretched out on a long garden chair. Sundown. The steps to the verandah and the room are behind him. The telex is visible and chattering in bursts like the machine-gun; it is apparent that the noise of the telex had entered Guthrie’s dream in the form of machine-gun fire. This noise has continued right through the transition of the scene. This sound is joined by the sound of an approaching car. The telex stops. Not far from Guthrie’s chair is his camera-bag, with pockets for cameras, lenses, exposed and unexposed film, and other small objects. An empty glass is lying near the chair.

    Guthrie is apparently asleep. FRANCIS enters and removes the empty glass and goes again. The car arrives. The car door slams. RUTH enters carrying two or three packages which she puts down. She comes into the room expecting to find somebody there (Guthrie’s car is outside) and then she sees him on the chair in the garden. She comes down and looks at him curiously. Guthrie doesn’t move. Ruth notices the bag and bends down and touches it, perhaps to peer inside it.

    GUTHRIE Please don’t touch that.

    RUTH I’m sorry.

    GUTHRIE Christ. That wasn’t nice at all.

    RUTH I thought you were asleep.

    GUTHRIE I thought I was dead.

    He has barely moved and now doesn’t move at all. Ruth looks at him.

    RUTH Are you all right now? (Pause.) That’s good. (Pause.) I don’t think we’ve met.

    Guthrie half sits up, then relapses.

    GUTHRIE Uh? Sorry, do you want to sit down?

    RUTH (drily) Thank you.

    She moves up the steps to the small table on the verandah and sits down. Guthrie seems to be coming to. He sits up slightly.

    You shouldn’t sleep in the sun.

    Guthrie squints up at the sky.

    GUTHRIE It moved.

    RUTH It does that. It’s called night and day.

    Guthrie relapses again. Francis comes on with a tea-tray, a nice tea-set with one cup and saucer. He brings this to Ruth’s table, while—

    ‘RUTH’ I think you’re going to like it.

    (Sings) ‘Night and day … you are the one.’

    With her right hand she plays imaginary piano keys on the table. We hear the piano.

    ‘Only you beneath the moon and under the—’

    A wrong note, caused by Francis placing the cup in the saucer. He has put the tray on the table in front of Ruth.

    RUTH Thank you, Francis. Has the house been opened to the public?

    FRANCIS What’s that, Mrs Carson?

    This gets through to Guthrie.

    GUTHRIE Oh—God—I’m terribly sorry—

    RUTH I shouldn’t

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