One Brit vs. The Utopians

摘要

He's back at last, that daredevil Brit—the guy who's so clever with quips but deep down is dead serious, who's as deft as an acrobat but tough enough to go the distance. No, no—not the new James Bond. We mean Stoppard. Tom Stoppard. Is there any job too daunting for this knighted playwright to tackle? He's taken up such topics as quantum physics ("Hapgood") and a repressed dead poet ("The Invention of Love") and turned them into brilliant entertainment. Now he's collared a band of 19th-century radical Russian intellectuals—a subject so vast he wound up writing not one but three plays.