Читать книгу Night and Day - Tom Stoppard - Страница 9

An empty stage with a cyclorama, representing the open air, and a living room share the stage in various proportions, including total occupancy by the one or the other. Thus, the living room is mobile. Herewith, a few dogmatic statements tentatively offered. The play begins with the empty stage (possibly a low skyline in front of the cyclorama). The room makes its first appearance by occupying about half the stage, the rest of the stage becoming garden. For Alastair’s entrance the room moves further round into view, leaving a corner of garden. The first act ends with a reverse transition to the empty stage. The second act presents the room in its position of total occupancy of the stage. There is, however, a limiting factor; we have to have a good view of the interior of an adjoining room, an office-study, which contains a telex machine. We see the machine through the door of the study, when the door is open; and the door can also shut it out of our view. When we first encounter the living room, the study door being open, we can see that the telex machine is operating, that is, the paper stuttering out of the machine. After Alastair’s entrance, our view of the machine does not have to be so direct. But, again, when the room is in its Act Two position we need a clear view of a man sitting at the telex. The telex is like a large modern typewriter, on a desk. It has to be ‘practical’ and operate on cue.

We are in a fictitious African country, formerly a British Colony. The living room is part of a large and expensive house. The furniture is European with local colour. It looks comfortable and well used. Essentials include a telephone, marble-topped table or sideboard with bottles and glasses on it, and a large sofa. The verandah also has suitable furniture on it, including a small table and a couple of chairs at the downstage end. The garden will contain at least one long comfortable cane chair. The room should seat five people comfortably, possibly around a low table. This furniture might well be in a shallow well, so that people entering the room from further inside the house, or from the study, do so from a good vantage. The room could be connected with the rest of the house through a door, more likely double-doors, or it might continue out of sight into the wings.

The first act—after the prologue—starts just before sunset, the last rays illuminating the garden; twilight follows quickly on this, and darkness has overtaken the play by the time of Ruth’s second entrance.