Scoop

By T.E.K

NIGHT AND DAY by Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard sits down at a keyboard of words, and plays upon them with wickedly clever virtuosity. Few can resist his cerebral variations on the themes of Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and The Importance of Being Earnest in Travesties.

For Stoppard, his new play Night and Day, currently running at London's Phoenix Theater, is a distinct departure. The characters are emotionally engaged and audience-involving. Like flexing previously unused muscles, this leads to odd moments of strain, which is not to say that Stoppard's satiric eye and elan vital do not make for a prevailingly entertaining evening.

The locale is an African state called Kambawe, autocratically ruled by President Mageeba (Olu Jacobs), an educated charmer and a closet savage. When Mageeba's regime is threatened by rebels, the world's newsmen smell blood.

Two who are already on the scene, and central to the play, meet at the house of Geoffrey Carson (David Langton), a mine owner. Dick Wagner (John Thaw) is a gruff yet engaging Australian. He is soon scooped by Jacob Milne (Peter Machin), an idealistic cub reporter who has interviewed the inaccessible rebel leader.

Goaded by Carson's wife Ruth (Diana Rigg), the two men do a certain amount of preachy credo-strutting. Night and Day is much concerned with the van ities and responsibilities of journalists and a free press. Ruth has the tart last word:

'I'm with you on the free press. It's the newspapers I can't stand."

The lady is an enigmatic character.

Ruth has done a one-night stand with Wagner in a London hotel and develops a fierce unrequited crush on Milne. She is, it seems, a romantic manquee who cannot recoup in sex what she has lost in love. While Rigg delivers all of Ruth's crisp-edged lines with hilarious asperity the feminine vulnerability of the role eludes her until she hears that Milne ha been machine-gunned to death. Then she rages in grief, waving a newspaper and asking what page in it was worth that price.

Night and Day finds Stoppard in an interesting transitional phase where without shelving his own mad cap, he is trying on Bernard Shaw's dialectical beard.

--T.E.K.

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