Night and Day
A Stoppard revival.
SF Weekly
October 2002
First a funny story: On opening night, San Francisco Chronicle editor Phil Bronstein sat behind the play’s director, Carey Perloff, and when an Englishwoman onstage made a crack about journalism — “Perhaps I’ll get him a reporter doll for Christmas,” she suggested, to a room full of journalists, “Wind him up and he gets it wrong!” — Perloff turned around and smacked Bronstein brightly on the knee.
Night and Day is about British correspondents in Africa, about innocence and experience, about love and death, and about journalism as a pillar of free society. When the play premiered in 1978, some of the critics were so shocked—shocked!—to see Tom Stoppard question the structure of a western free press they wondered in print whether he wasn’t some kind of heretic. Time has proved that he isn’t (he’s one of the greatest living playwrights in English), and A.C.T.’s 24th-anniversary revival of Night and Day should prove the aging script to be a minor classic, a beautiful and near-seamless example of realism which a lot of people never associate with Stoppard.
The production is not seamless, but René Augesen does so well as Ruth Carson, the Englishwoman, that most of the problems recede to nothing. Ruth is married to a wealthy British copper baron and lives in the fictional African country of Kambawe. Augesen perfectly captures the accent and bitter smile of a sunburnt Londoner going to seed in a former colony, with a loose gold blouse and piled blonde hair. Ruth drinks too much, sleeps around, and has a forked tongue. Three London journalists gather at her opulent home to cover an uprising in Kambawe (once a British colony), partly because the Carsons have a Telex machine but also because of Geoffrey Carson’s connections to “President” Mageeba, who’s indistinguishable from a dictator. Oh, and Ruth, it seems, once had a cheap fling with one of the reporters—Dick Wagner—in a London hotel room.
Dick Wagner is an arrogant cock from Australia who wears a plaid, polyester-blend suit, a broad tie, and a mop of brownish hair. For the first minute or so I didn’t even recognize him as one of A.C.T.’s core-group actors. I sat there wondering what was wrong with his accent and realized, “Oh. It’s just Marco Barricelli.” Wagner has to say things like “Spicial Corrispowndint” or “Oi wos syin’, yo’ ixcellincy” (I was saying, your excellency), in an unfortunate, high-in-the-throat voice that fails to make use of Barricelli’s deep-chested baritone. Dick Wagner is still a large, clear presence onstage, with a predatory interest in his gentleman host’s wife—Barricelli, in other words, inhabits the character in every other way—he just talks a little funny.
Wagner’s turf in Kambawe is threatened by a young rival named Jacob Milne, who turns out to be a strike-breaker from a small town in England. He lucked into a freelance gig with Wagner’s paper, The Sunday Telegraph. Milne’s idealistic notion of a free press and his anti-union attitudes ignite a debate with Wagner about limits on the freedom of a corporate-run paper. Are journalists heroes delivering truth on a modest salary, or workers dependent on the whims of a wealthy publisher? More to the point (and implicitly): If one of them dies in action, has he given his life for veritas, or for a few column-inches assigned by a profiteering newspaper boss?
The counterweight to this left-right parlor dispute is President Mageeba, played magnificently by Steven Anthony Jones. After a few minutes of sweet talk, in his gold jewelry and combat fatigues, Mageeba launches into a fierce tyrannical rant that cows even Dick Wagner and suggests that a nation subject to the whims of an immature, tantrumizing dictator is in worse shape than any scribbler from London can imagine. “Do you know what I mean by a press that is relatively free, Mr. Wagnah?” says Mageeba, with a dangerous grin.
“Not exactly sir, no.”
“It means a press that is edited by one of my relatives!”
One reason Stoppard’s script survives is that it navigates the Cold-War politics of 1970s colonial Africa — where the U.S. and Soviet Union both fought proxy wars — without apologizing for either side. A dictator’s a dictator, and Mageeba the Soviet-backed autocrat gets none of the soft treatment from Stoppard that, say, Tony Kushner gives to Ethel Rosenberg (who handed A-bomb secrets to Stalin) just because of her socialism. That’s not to say certain details don’t feel dated or parochial: The race humor is sour now, not jaunty, and Stoppard has actually tinkered with the script for this production to make his very British labor dispute more comprehensible to Americans.
But the core of the play is still vital, and Carey Perloff has dressed up her production with an expensive-looking set by Annie Smart (the Carsons’ home swivels open and shut) and Peter Maradudin’s lights (which pay attention to the colors of an African night and day). The Telex machine, Dick Wagner’s horrible suit, and the other dated-looking details have simply slipped into history, and they bring back a time when war journalism was a freer commodity — when reporters at least had access to war zones, and you could learn more about Uganda or Vietnam in a copy of the Chronicle than you can, these days, about Iraq.
Michael Scott Moore
