[Diverse] elements have gone into the making of Tom Stoppard's Night and Day … but they do not give it real coherence.

Its "novelty" is that it is the first example in its author's work of more or less traditionally plotted drama. There still remain characteristic passages of improvisational playfulness and fancy. In this case they relate to Ruth Carson's (the "leading lady's") inner monologue and daydreams…. Ruth Carson is given the opportunity to say many amusing things (often only in her mind) about herself, this central situation and the various personages involved in it.

She despises the popular press and the reporters who feed it too often indiscriminately with trivia and grave news. They do so not because they are genuinely concerned with either but out of a display of vanity in hunting down headline-making stories. This is one of the play's points, the rebuttal to which, delivered by a cockney news photographer, is that the information provided by the press, despite all the skulduggery which may be involved in unearthing it, is invaluable to a democracy: "It brings light." That, if anything, is the play's thesis. In itself, it may be valid, but it is not dramatized; it is merely stated.

In the same way, Ruth Carson … is more a decorative and entertaining adjunct to the play than crucial to it. (pp. 636-37)

[The various strands of plot] are patched together rather than made integral to a dramatically convincing whole. What keeps the play going is Stoppard's elegantly fluent and sometimes sparkling writing. (p. 637)