Tom stoppard, p.42
Tom Stoppard, page 42
A few years later, when the print unions, a year after the crushing of the miners’ strike, attempted to resist modernising technology at the Murdoch papers, because it would led to mass lay-offs, and were outmanoeuvred and defeated by Murdoch’s moving the Sunday Times to Wapping, he was “gung ho for Wapping, for Murdoch, for Thatcher.” He thought they were freeing Fleet Street “from the protection racket.” In later years, caught up in the debate about the Leveson Inquiry, he would look back critically on his “zeal for an untrammelled press” and on his refusal to accept that media ownership by tycoons might involve quite as much censorship as the stranglehold of the unions. “Now,” he said in 2005, “I’d be capable of writing a letter in reply to myself…Look at Berlusconi and Putin—it’s complete manipulation and control.”
In the late 1970s he said repeatedly, in private and in public, that a free press was at the heart of “English social virtues,” and that the most important thing for a nation’s health and civilisation was to have a press that could put all views objectively (for instance on Cambodia). When he compared Communist countries and the West, he would say: “Again and again, it all comes down to a free press.” And, at forty as at seventeen, he was a journalism groupie. As a schoolboy, his fantasy was to be a tough, grizzled war journalist, sending back true facts under fire, from somewhere in Africa. He loved meeting the big men of journalism, like Walter Winchell, or Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post. He asked Harold Evans, editor of the Sunday Times, to help him with his new play. He was well aware of how ruthlessly competitive journalists could be, and he knew about cheap, tacky tabloid journalism: he’d put all that into Dirty Linen. The sleaze was the price you paid for the independence. But like Maddie in Dirty Linen, he also wanted to tell people who despised the press: “You don’t know the first thing about journalism.”
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As usual, once the idea for the play came into focus, he wrote it fast, through 1978. He wanted a situation where journalists’ lives could be at risk in a dangerous country. The deaths of the journalists Nick Tomalin, in Israel in 1973, and David Holden, the Sunday Times Middle East correspondent, in Cairo, at the end of 1977, made a strong impact on him. He was a great admirer of the photojournalist Don McCullin. As a schoolboy in 1954, just about to become a journalist, he had read Steinbeck on the death of his friend, the great combat photojournalist Robert Capa, with emotion. He didn’t want to set the play in Vietnam or Cambodia, because he wanted a locale where British journalists would be at the centre of the action. So he settled for an imaginary African country on the brink of a post-colonial civil war—just when the Ethiopia–Somalia war of 1977 had broken out. He told his brother Peter that he’d thought of going to Ethiopia or Somalia for a few days but it was “too complicated.” The trouble with the African setting was that if he put a British-educated African politician into the play, he would end up sounding like a Stoppard character. As he said in interviews, he’s “the only African president who speaks like me.”
Waugh’s Scoop, with its naive “nature notes” columnist sent out by mistake to an African revolution, and inadvertently making fools of the hardened war hacks, was a major inspiration. Someone in Night and Day even says, “Up to a point, Lord Copper.” So was The Front Page, one of his favourite plays. He didn’t want to start the play in “the boardroom of a Fleet Street newspaper,” it would be too much of a cliché, but when he came to write a film script (never made) of the play, he did start it in Fleet Street. All through the play, newspaper life is strongly present: in the angry telegrams from the editor written in telex-speech, as in Scoop; in the scorn of the London journalists for the provincial papers; in the battles between the union reps and the proprietors, the tyranny of the deadline for the weekly paper, the low tricks used by hacks in competition, the cheap tabloid headlines, the war-story clichés. All this material was close to his heart. He described the play, jokingly, to his mother, as “an everyday tale of journalism folk.”
The play starts at full throttle: a helicopter roaring in, a jeep with headlights full on, a machine-gun attack, a dramatic killing. As usual he was “ambushing” his audience. It turns out to be the nightmare of the photojournalist who is sleeping on stage. The play will act out that nightmare. It’s like a scene from a movie, and Night and Day is full of echoes from the movies.
Three journalists converge on an English mine-owner’s house in “Kambawe,” a Central African country caught up in a classic post-colonial conflict between a British-educated, repressive military ruler and a Communist-backed insurgency, with British business interests and international UN peacekeeping forces on the margins. The politics of post-colonialism are not the main subject, but we get what we need about the stand-off between the corrupt President Mageeba and the offstage Colonel Shimbu, backed by Russians and Cubans, who wants to get control of the airstrip. There’s some grim comedy about the relics of empire: the British outrage at Communist tactics, the journalists’ hotel called the Sandringham, flowing with Scotch whisky, the condescension to the black house-servant (who turns out to be an ally of the revolution). The British mine-owner Carson (rather like Charles Gould in Conrad’s Nostromo) tries to negotiate between the warring factions, in his own commercial interests: it’s an intriguing bit of the plot, but not very involving. The sinister figure of the dictator—who, as he points out himself, played Caliban, not Othello, when he was in England—dominates the second act more for his ominous contribution to the debate about a free press than for an insight into African politics. But the heart of the play is the relationship among the three journalists, and the feelings of Carson’s wife, Ruth, the only woman in the play. She has her own views on journalism, so there’s a debate going on throughout about the advantages and disadvantages of a free press.
The rival journalists, most of whom are stuck, Scoop-style, in the nearest one-horse town with no good communications and no first-hand information, want the use of the mine-owner’s telex machine. The technology of the time—telex, the printers’ stone, cassette tape, Nikon, Kodak and Leica cameras—is crucial to the action. The play is in love with the technical terms of the trade, the in-jokes, the war stories, the way the guys talk to each other when they are on a job.
Guthrie, the battered, tough, world-travelled photojournalist who will go into any danger zone to get the picture, ends up with the key speech about truth-telling. He’s not a daredevil or a martyr—“I don’t intend to die for anyone”—but he stands for the function and value of the press.
We’re not here to be on somebody’s side…We try to show what happened, and what it was like. That’s all we do…I’ve been around a lot of places. People do awful things to each other. But it’s worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark. It really is. Information is light. Information, in itself, about anything, is light. That’s all you can say, really.
His colleague on the Sunday Globe, Wagner, is a cynical Australian who files stories from wherever there’s trouble. “I am not a foreign correspondent…I am a fireman. I go to fires. Brighton or Kambawe—they’re both out-of-town stories and I cover them the same way. I don’t file prose. I file facts.” He’s furious because some anonymous freelance “special correspondent” has scooped him with a front-page story in his own paper, an interview with the rebel Colonel Shimbu. Wagner imagines his rival as “a boy-scout in an Austin Reed safari suit who somehow got lucky.” In comes Jake Milne, answering to that description, an optimistic idealist, fresh from resigning from the Grimsby Evening Messenger because he stood out against the local journalists’ strike against the management. To Wagner, a union man, he’s not just the boy who stole his story, he’s “the Grimsby scab.”
The argument is intensified by Ruth Carson’s presence. She has (coincidentally) just had a one-night stand in London with Wagner, and she falls in love with Jake as soon as she sets eyes on him. She has her own reasons for disliking the press, having been raked over and hounded (“in that Lego-set language they have”) as “the other woman” in Carson’s divorce from his first wife, and is eloquent on the “grubby symbiosis” between “the populace and the popular press.” She speaks the line that would always be quoted out of context as Stoppard’s own view: “I’m with you on the free press. It’s the newspapers I can’t stand.” She prefers the unfettered competition between newspaper magnates to the union closed shop, and uses the voice of her camera-mad little boy, Alistair, a journalist in the making, to spell out her point: “His theory—Alistair’s theory—is that it’s the very free-for-all which guarantees the freedom of each.”
Ruth’s secret erotic desires are a powerful focus. The long scene of her seduction of Jake Milne at the start of Act Two, which (like Guthrie’s nightmare at the start of Act One) turns out to be a fantasy, existing in a parallel world, night for day, is in sensual contrast to the macho talk in the rest of the play. In the “real” world of war and politics, urgent, complicated plotting and scheming and double dealing is going on, the outcome of which is tragically fatal to Jake. Ruth and Wagner, two disillusioned, compromised and bitter characters, are washed up alone at the end in gathering darkness.
But the plot that matters is the debate about the fourth estate: the unions versus the managers, tabloid rubbish as the price paid for press freedom, the threat to that freedom under a brutal dictatorship. Mageeba’s most sinister line is: “Do you know what I mean by a relatively free press, Mr. Wagner?…I mean a free press which is edited by one of my relatives.” By contrast, Jake Milne makes an idealistic defence of banal, local British reporting, in a speech that is untypically autobiographical, a tribute and a valediction to Stoppard’s Bristol days.
People think that rubbish-journalism is produced by men of discrimination who are vaguely ashamed of truckling to the lowest taste. But it’s not. It’s produced by people doing their best work…I started off like that, admiring it, trying to be that good, looking up to Fleet Street stringers, London men sometimes, on big local stories. I thought it was great. Some of the best times in my life have been spent sitting in a clapped-out Ford Consul outside a suburban house with a packet of Polos and twenty Players, waiting to grab a bereaved husband or a footballer’s runaway wife…I felt part of a privileged group, inside society and yet outside it, with a licence to scourge it and a duty to defend it, night and day, the street of adventure, the fourth estate. And the thing is—I was dead right…Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins.
Jake’s line to Ruth sums up the author’s views: “A free press, free expression—it’s the last line of defence for all the other freedoms.” Guthrie and Milne, Stoppard told an interviewer, “utterly speak for me.”
The play opened in November 1978 and was running well in May 1979 when Margaret Thatcher won her first victory for the Tories. She immediately set about her agenda of crushing the unions, privatising public industries, diminishing the power of the state and demonising the Marxist left. The Stoppards were all for it. Like Paul Johnson, they admired her greatly, and became social acquaintances in the 1980s. In October 1982, for instance, she was the guest of honour at the historian Hugh Thomas’s house, with Stoppard, Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender, Anthony Powell, Philip Larkin, Jack Plumb and Nicholas Mosley—“all men.” “The PM is impressive, never stuck for a riposte, and utterly convinced of the superiority of Englishness over Frenchness Germanness and Spanishness.” On another occasion she invited him to dinner with Reagan at 10 Downing Street. Miriam did an assured, tender and respectful television interview with Thatcher in 1985. In retrospect, he noted her philistinism and her divisiveness; at the time, she seemed to him what the country needed. “Mrs. T was my heroine,” he would say, “entirely on the issue of print unions…I hated what the printers were doing to my precious newspapers. Thatcher and Murdoch saved the day.”
The mood of Night and Day matched the start of Thatcherism. This did not endear him to his old enemies on the theatrical left (the phrase “militant conservatism” has been used of the play), but that did not worry him, though he knew the “faint aroma” of being a reactionary would hang around him for the rest of his life. The play also involved him in an argument with David Hare, whom he admired. This wasn’t a quarrel over the play’s treatment of the unions, but over what Hare saw as his idealisation of a revolting profession. Stoppard said of the argument, looking back: he thought I romanticised scumbags. Hare’s own play about British journalism, Pravda, would take a very different line in 1985.
Hare read the play a few months before it opened, and told Stoppard, in a long, fierce letter, that it had “provoked him beyond measure.” Didn’t Stoppard realise that journalists wanted to be degraded, wanted to have their prose slashed by sub-editors and wanted “cretinous capitalist proprietors,” so that they could have a permanent excuse for “the indifference of their own standards”? Didn’t he know how many journalists “believe one thing and write another”? All Fleet Street journalists know they’re writing “mind-numbing shit,” but they can’t help it, they say, because they aren’t free. “I am very shocked that you, who in Professional Foul and Jumpers is so clearly arguing for careful stewardship of the truth should now befriend one of its principal enemies.” His play was going to “give comfort to all the bad consciences of the newspaper business.”
Stoppard read the letter and put it in the bag he always carried around with him. He had just come back from a quick trip to Pittsburgh, where Every Good Boy was performed in September, and had been given his travel expenses—about $1,500—in cash. He was taking an afternoon nap in the bar of the Arts Theatre, where rehearsals for Night and Day were underway, when his bag was stolen, with all the money and David Hare’s letter. Stoppard told Hare that as a result he was having to reconstruct his argument from memory. But he responded firmly. He was “profoundly right,” and Hare was only “trivially right.”
Do I really have to cull the five newspapers delivered to my house this morning to convince you that there is as much baby as bathwater and that you ought to think this thing through before you tip them both out in a fit of bad temper? You have made the utterly boring discovery that journalism contains at least as many incompetents, fools, sloths and cynics as any other trade, and you have embraced the superannuated half-truth that the entire press is the personal property of a few capitalist barons…Your letter is not simply unconvincing ideologically, it has got reporters wrong.
He referred him to Ruth and Guthrie’s arguments in the play, who were “both right.” He wasn’t romanticising journalists. Don McCullin, his main inspiration for Guthrie, was brave. “I could list you a hundred instances of the British press as it is being a force for truth and justice.” But just because the press was at times “inaccurate, slanted, malicious, deluded, etc.,” Hare seemed to be saying: “Let’s only have plays showing how contemptible all journalists are without exception or qualification.”
Hare replied that in losing his briefcase Stoppard had also lost sight of Hare’s argument—he hadn’t said all journalists were corrupted, but he did see a profession in which “it is common to write what you do not actually believe.” This produced a “profound cynicism.” He had never met a playwright who said: “I had to say that but I don’t believe it.” Stoppard wrote back to say that his bag had now been found, and that the thief, “thinking only in the short term, had taken the money, but left your letter.” Rereading the letter, he didn’t think he’d misrepresented Hare’s argument. Sure, a journalist might often have a piece cut “in such a way as to distort what he wished to say.” But usually the cutting was inept or hasty, not the result of “malicious principle.” Hare said he “often” met journalists who disowned what they had written. “I have never met one. Not one. Ever.”
Hare had one more go, only a couple of weeks before the play opened. It amazed him that Stoppard, “who has attacked interference with writers’ work in the incomparably worse way it’s attacked in Russia, should be so attracted to a profession in which, on however much smaller a scale, it is NORMAL for people not to write their best.” Why, he asked, was that cynical movie about journalists, The Front Page, so attractive to them both? “Because we both think how nice it would be to be innocent of self-doubt, and not to care; there is something very attractive about that kind of cynicism. But you are fucked, Tom, because you have moral seriousness written all over you, and don’t tell me you don’t.” Hare regretted the quarrel, and their friendship survived it. In 1985, doing publicity for Pravda, he wrote to Stoppard correcting a rumour that he had described Night and Day as “appalling.”
In their debate, Stoppard stands firm, while making it nicely clear from the tone—as with the joke about the bag thief—that the argument was not going to become a quarrel. He tended not to quarrel. But the exchange made a strong impression on him, and, so soon before the play opened, it came as a challenge. While Hare generalises passionately, Stoppard refers him to the particular points of view represented in the play, which he felt he was defending.
Before the play opened, he was anxious about it, confiding to his parents: “There are days when I lose confidence in the play & think—oh yes this is the one which stops the Stoppard carnival! We shall see.” And some critics were underwhelmed by its realism and its talkiness—for them it was too like Shaw and not enough like Stoppard. “A descent into naturalism” was one judgement. Peter Hall thought it was “about too many things, everything that is in Tom’s head at the moment…He has tried to make it into one play. It’s four at least.” But the English audience liked it. This was a play written for Michael Codron and for the non-subsidised, commercial theatre, Stoppard’s second play for Codron after The Real Inspector Hound. And Codron’s commitment paid off, though there were plenty of technical headaches—he had to search around for a theatre that would be able to cope with a jeep coming on stage at the start of the play. At one point he told Stoppard that this wasn’t going to be possible. “No jeep, no play,” the answer came back.
