Night and Day by Tom Stoppard

First published: 1978

First produced: 1978, at the Phoenix Theatre, London

Type of plot: Psychological

Time of work: The 1970’s

Locale: Kambawe, a fictitious former British colony in Africa

Principal Characters:

• George Guthrie, a British photographer for the Sunday Globe
• Dick Wagner, his partner, an Australian roving reporter
• Jacob Milne, a young, idealistic British correspondent
• Geoffrey Carson, a British colonial survivor
• Ruth Carson, his wife
• Mageeba, the president of Kambawe

The Play

Night and Day begins with a dream sequence in which the photographer Guthrie is gunned down by machine-gun fire. The scene quickly changes to the reality of a comfortable colonial veranda where the audience meets the hostess, Ruth Carson, the attractive wife of mine-owner Geoffrey Carson. Guthrie has arrived, uninvited, to await his colleague, Dick Wagner. Both are journalists in the midst of a revolution in the fictitious Kambawe. President Mageeba is beset by the insurgent Colonel Shimbu, and the wealthy Carson will act as middleman in their peace talks. The journalists have heard rumors of this meeting and thus intrude themselves on the Carsons in order to be on the scene of the action. They also need access to the telex machine Carson possesses. An anonymous special correspondent has, meanwhile, scooped the two professionals by obtaining an exclusive interview with Shimbu and sending it to their own London paper, the Sunday Globe. This same reporter, the young and idealistic Jacob Milne, arrives on the scene with Carson and has information for another potential scoop: Shimbu’s forces have secretly attacked and captured Carson’s mines.

Dick Wagner is furious with the idea of the younger reporter’s success, but even more so when he learns that Milne had worked previously for the Grimsby Evening Messenger and was the “Grimsby Scab,” the reporter who broke ranks by refusing to join the journalists’ union in the strike against management. Wagner is a staunch union man, a good old boy of the old school. The three journalists debate the rules of the profession, while each plays his own game in trying to be the first to get the story of the African war to the waiting world. Wagner remains at the Carsons’ home knowing of the secret meeting to take place there between Mageeba and Shimbu, and Wagner sends Milne with Guthrie to the scene of the fighting to pass on to Shimbu the president’s reply to his request for peace negotiations.

Act 1 also introduces the subtext of the play, the special relationships of Wagner and Ruth and of Ruth and Milne. It is revealed that the week before the above action begins, Ruth was in London to fetch her eight-year-old son from school and met Dick Wagner, with whom she had a one-night stand. She had previously been faithful to the older, dour Carson, and she feels considerable remorse about her interlude with Wagner. He avoids a direct confrontation when they meet again in her home but alludes to their liaison and seems quite agreeable to a continuation of the affair. This possibility is abhorrent to her. Her special rules allow her one extramarital event or, if consumed by passion, a thousand. She asserts that “twice, Wagner, twice—a lady might think she’d been taken for a tart.” In the meantime, she is attracted to Milne, his youth and idealism, his purity of profession, his total difference from Wagner.

As the second act begins, the lines are drawn. Wagner is determined to scoop Milne on the peace talks in the African war and to preserve his “old pro” way of life and of journalism. Ruth has a fantasy encounter with Milne, but in reality she and Carson await the secret visit of the president when Wagner intrudes, determined to be present during the negotiations. Mageeba arrives and proves to be a match for Wagner. London-educated, articulate, and perfectly in control, Mageeba conducts the interview on his own terms and intrudes his own view of the fifth estate; his has to be a “relatively free press . . . I mean a free press which is edited by one of my relatives.” He concludes by shouting a diatribe against Wagner and the Sunday Globe and strikes Wagner’s head with his weighted cane. Guthrie bursts into the room shouting that Milne has been killed—shot in the cross fire as his Jeep approached Colonel Shimbu’s headquarters.

The play ends in a final irony: The war in Africa and the Fleet Street journalistic wars converge. Milne’s final story has been “blacked” by the union, because of his anti-union stance in Grimsby. There is a strike and all the weekend papers are shut down. Wagner’s great scoop, his interview with President Mageeba, will not be printed. The alliance of Ruth and Milne will never be. The gentle, idealistic side of her nature that she revealed to Milne during the brief meeting at the end of the first act and the more elaborate scene of seduction at the beginning of the second act are now subverted. She gives in to Wagner: “I want to be hammered out, disjointed, folded up and put away like linen in a drawer.” She will have a second night with Wagner after all. Wagner uses the telex to reach the Sunday Globe—not to transmit his scoop of a lifetime but to dictate Jacob Milne’s obituary.

Dramatic Devices

Night and Day introduces both acts with an attention-grabbing flight from reality. The first act opens to the beauty of an African sunset shattered by a helicopter, the headlights of a Jeep driving onstage, machine-gun fire, and a spotlight following the photographer Guthrie as he darts about. A burst of gunfire catches him and he falls. This image immediately changes over to Guthrie in a garden chair, the machine-gun fire the noise of a telex, the Jeep an approaching car. It has been a dream but a projection of the play’s action: the attacks on the press and the war in Kambawe, which will provide the backdrop for the dramatized debate to follow.

The second act begins with Ruth Carson in the night section of the play, verbally seducing Jacob Milne. It concludes with her walking naked after him into the darkness outside, but this entire action is illusion. In the play’s reality, Milne is dead, and Carson, Ruth, and Wagner await a visit from the embattled President Mageeba. With his arrival and their subsequent conversation, the topic of the ethics and responsibilities of journalism again takes precedence.

Probably the most outstanding device Stoppard uses to clarify the play’s issues and draw the audience into the action is the interior dialogue between Ruth the character and “Ruth.” She is inside the action as Carson’s wife and as Wagner’s former and Milne’s potential lover. She comments wryly on their elevated views of the press and its freedoms and responsibilities and brings a humor and perspective to the debate, and to the play, which make both more interesting. As “Ruth,” she reveals herself as a bruised, lonely, self-questioning woman, seeking in fantasy a life of romance that neither the cynical Wagner nor the practical Carson can provide. “Ruth” has a morality that prods her to confess her one-night fling with Wagner to her husband, an idealism that desires the youthful Milne, and a self-destructiveness that moves her to a second coupling with Wagner. Her debates with her inner self reveal a contrasting personality attracted to both sides of the larger journalism issue: Wagner, the unromantic opportunist to whom career and tomorrow’s edition are all-important, and Milne, the gentle neophyte who believes that a free press and human decency must endure at all costs. In the real world of both sex and journalism, Stoppard implies, principle will give way to compromise and expediency.

Ruth is given to snatches of song that offer interesting comment on the play’s tensions. When she finds herself confronted with Wagner and attracted to Milne, she sings lines from “Night and Day” and the Beatles song “Help!” In questioning her own morality and wondering at her moral future, she sings “The Lady Is a Tramp.” Her sardonic eloquence lends a color and an appeal to the play’s entire action, elevating it from a wordy debate on press ethics to a human conundrum of personal morality.

Critical Context

In Night and Day, Stoppard’s fourth full-length play, the author moves into a stage naturalism without sacrificing his verbal dexterity. The playwright’s usual formula—a marriage of serious ideas with high comedy—was set aside for this play. With Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (pr. 1966, pb. 1967), Travesties (pr. 1974, pb. 1975), and Jumpers (pr., pb. 1972), the astounding verbal and intellectual gymnastics are so effective that the plays are always highly entertaining but not totally accessible. Puns are piled upon puns; characters engage in fast and furious convoluted exchanges. Language itself is one of Stoppard’s prime concerns, a concern that links his work with that of the German linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In Stoppard’s relativistic world, no absolute meaning seems possible; language’s very usefulness and reliability are therefore under constant examination. There are strong absurdist elements in his plays—Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, for example, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, remind one of the hapless Vladimir and Estragon of Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot (pb. 1952; Waiting for Godot, 1954)—but to Stoppard, language is ultimately an extremely valuable quantity; to the absurdists, it is most often meaningless and incomprehensible.

Stoppard combines the theater of ideas with an acute perception of twentieth century chaos and confusion, infusing the mixture with the brisk entertainment and humor of an Oscar Wilde play. Stoppard’s Travesties, in fact, parodies Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (pr. 1895) while incorporating Vladimir Lenin and novelist James Joyce as characters who are filtered through a narrator’s only partially reliable memory. The linguistic and philosophical gymnastics of Jumpers become literal gymnastics as well: The members of a university philosophy department are also members of an amateur gymnastics group. Their human pyramids tumble, however, and the philosophical issues remain unresolved, just as in his whodunit The Real Inspector Hound (pr., pb. 1968) the murder mystery remains unsolved—and insoluble.

Night and Day contains the Stoppardian coda; clever quips and repartee abound. Words are taken at their face value, then stretched, wrung out, and put back into context, to the delight of the audience. In Night and Day, however, the message, not the mode, dominates, and the audience is, if less dazzled, certainly more aware of Stoppard’s intention. It is not so much a play for the intelligentsia as it is one for the thoughtful.

Sources for Further Study

Anchetta, Richard A. Tom Stoppard: An Analytical Study of His Plays. Chicago: Advent, 1991.

Bigsby, C. W. E. Tom Stoppard. Harlow, England: Longman, 1976.

Cahn, Victor L. Beyond Absurdity: The Plays of Tom Stoppard. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1979.

Dean, Joan Fitzpatrick. Tom Stoppard: Comedy as a Moral Matrix. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1981.

Gabbard, Paquet Lucina. The Stoppard Plays. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1982.

Gitzen, Julian. “Tom Stoppard: Chaos in Perspective.” Southern Humanities Review 10 (1976): 143-152.

Gussow, Mel. Conversations with Stoppard. New York: Grove-Atlantic, 1996.

Harty, John. Tom Stoppard: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1987.

Hayman, Ronald. Tom Stoppard. London: Heinemann, 1977.

Londre, Felicia Hardison. Tom Stoppard. New York: F. Ungar, 1981.

Whitaker, Thomas. Tom Stoppard. New York: Grove Press, 1984.