Lady Be Good

By T.E. Kalem

NIGHT AND DAY

by Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard is a rabbit breeder of words--button-tailed, twitchy-nosed, big-eared, bright-eyed and always on the hop. Onstage, words do lead to talk, too much talk, perhaps, in this play, but much of it is exhilaratingly Shavian. In the new guise of a didact, Stoppard comes out for a free press ("Information is light).

However, he does have skeptical reservations about journalism and regards reporters as hostages to the whims, slants and manias of press tycoons. Night and Day, like some British journalism, is partially caught in a time warp with The Front Page and the yen for scoops.

The locale is Africa. Reporters are bee-swarming on the scent of deep trouble in the emergent nation of Kambawe. The dictator, President Mageeba (Clarence Williams III), is toughing it out with a rival faction. Three newshounds converge on the opulent, isolated home of Geoffrey Carson (Joseph Maher), a British businessman with the most mines to lose. Dick Wagner (Paul Hecht) is a hardbitten Aussie, and a staunch unionist with a habit of regarding the Daily Globe, his paper, as larger than the earthly one. He is visibly miffed to find that an idealistic fledgling staff writer, Jacob Milne (Peter Evans), has scored a beat on him by interviewing the rebel leader. The trio is completed by a photographer (Dwight Schultz) who has apparently seen some thing of this increasingly nebulous struggle. As the play progresses, all the gentlemen in it begin to resemble rhetorical wallpaper.

The magnet of the evening is Maggie Smith as Carson's wife Ruth. She seems to have slithered out of a Noel Coward comedy. Sophisticated, weary of it all, and restless, Ruth is given to brisk interior monologues, like "Help!" or "Watch it Tallulah!" Stoppard has given her a tasty collation of epigrams, and her delivery is succulent. Of her one-night London stand with Wagner, she notes that "hotel rooms constitute a separate moral universe." She develops a sensual fantasy crush on Milne and is heart-wrenchingly crushed when he is killed. Seductively comic, and amusingly seductive, Smith must challenge the aggressive charmlessness of Broadway's ANTA Theater, a house to which she rightly objected. Playing the ANTA stage is like pitching a tent in the Sahara. If the agile firm of Stoppard and Smith can hold this ground, Stoppard will be most beholden to Smith.

-T.E. Kalem

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