Robert Brunstein, the TNR drama critic, offers this comment on Tom Stoppard: “Like Shaw, Stoppard has always been an omnivorous reader and has never been reluctant to share his scholarship with his audiences. If I still can’t get as excited about his playwriting as my fellow critics (and my Harvard undergraduates), that is because his wit and erudition have always seemed to be more on display than his capacity to penetrate the skin of human consciousness.” In my limited reading of Stoppard, that judgment rings exactly right, though it does not detract from my delight in Stoppards wit and learning.
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