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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.
About the author
Tom Stoppard was born "Tomás Straüssler" in Zlin, Czechoslovakia in 1937 and moved to England with his family in 1946. Catapulted into the front ranks of modern playwrights overnight when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead opened in London in 1967, he has become recognized as a contemporary comic master, the brilliantly acclaimed author of The Real Inspector Hound, Enter a Free Man, Albert's Bridge, After Magritte, Travesties, Dirty Linen, Jumpers, New-Found-Land, Night and Day, The Real Thing, Hapgood, Artist Descending a Staircase, Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, Arcadia, The Invention of Love, The Coast of Utopia (Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage), and Rock 'n' Roll. He has also written a number of screenplays, including The Romantic Englishwoman, Despair, and Brazil. In 2017, he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in literature.
Summary
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.
Additional text
Praise for Night and Day:
“An unabashed paean to the fourth estate, or at least the Fleet Street branch, and those knights-errant who rode out on crusades to far-flung lands in search of a scoop, a snapshot, booze, a fair maiden and a working telex, not always in that order.”—New York Times
“Stimulating [and] consistently funny.”—Boston Globe
“Witty, imaginative, and theatrical.”—Houston Chronicle
“A high-stakes, high-minded drama loaded with zingy speeches about the virtues and vices of the fourth estate.”—Washington Post
“A masterpiece.”—Weekly Standard
“This funny, exciting and thoughtful drama makes all Stoppard’s other plays look like so many nursery games . . . It contains a scalding attack on the vulgarities of the gutter Press—and then defends them. But his central point stands unassailed: If you have a free Press, everything is correctable, and without, it everything is concealable.”—Telegraph (UK)
“Stoppard turns in his license as a brilliant comedian of ideas for a new ‘seriousness’ . . . Night and Day shows this dazzling playwright very much in transition.”—Newsweek
“Night and Day finds Stoppard in an interesting transitional phrase where, without shelving his own mad cap, he is trying on Bernard Shaw’s dialectical beard.”—Time
