["Night and Day"] surprises us by not surprising us. For the first time in his career, [Tom Stoppard] has written a conventionally straightforward melodrama, showing few traces of the breathtaking verbal acrobatics at the top of the tent of language with which he has previously dazzled us. There is much talk in the play, and it proves to be Shavian in a bad sense, which is to say that it is more garrulous than witty. A pertinent topic for discussion has been chosen by Teacher Tom: What does our newspaper press exist for, except to make money? If it can be argued to have a purpose beyond mere money-making, is it one for which the lives of individuals—and, indeed, of entire countries—ought to be sacrificed? Mr. Stoppard was a journalist before he was a playwright, and he can make a strong case for the power of the press to expose corruption and do battle against tyranny, but there are understandably few novelties remaining in this case, and the background of violent action against which an assortment of characters offer their opinions also lacks novelty.

The setting of "Night and Day" is the luxurious country house of a British businessman, Geoffrey Carson, in the mythical African state of Kambawe, formerly a British colony…. [We assume] that Mrs. Carson is intended to be the leading character in the play; she has the most to say and do, and her lines and her conduct are certainly more amusing than those of any other person onstage, but by the end of the evening she turns out to have curiously little connection with the rest of the play. She is simply there, chattering away and fantasizing à la Walter Mitty, and I came to feel that though Stoppard is reputed to have invented her in order to demonstrate that he was capable of writing a satisfactory part for a woman, she wasn't one—on the contrary, she was an essentially genderless puppet, having no connection with her husband, her son, or her exlover. (p. 113)