W. B. Yeats once called Ibsen the chosen author of very clever journalists. How much more appropriate this is as a description of Tom Stoppard. He has insinuated himself into the affections of smart people like a heartworm, usurping whatever place might once have been reserved there for genuine artists. Can anyone really take Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead seriously after seeing the plays on which it was based, Six Characters in Search of an Author and Waiting for Godot? I'm not complaining that Stoppard is lightweight; there's a place in my heart, too, for good-natured entertainments. I'm grumbling rather over how he has used his considerable gifts in the service of a shell game, conning the intelligentsia into finding him significant with a few philosophical reflections on a few intellectual themes. As a dramatist, Stoppard is a dandy. His plays frequently toy with difficult subjects, but they are essentially not very serious conceits—pirouettes by a rather vain dancer who knows he can leap higher than anyone else but seems to have forgotten why.

Like many intelligent émigrés, Stoppard has learned well how to imitate the customs of his adopted country; the trouble is that the imitation is largely a matter of style. Perhaps upper-middle-class English drama is largely a matter of style…. (p. 23)

[Whatever might be cogent in Night and Day] is obscured by an excess of verbal sparks and stylish posturing, distracting us from the author's intention to the author's manner. Things happen in the play—a revolution, a savage beating, a senseless death—but only as commas and semicolons in the dialogue. Typical is a moment when one of Stoppard's characters, in the midst of an uprising, describes the way a single event would be reported in every British newspaper; I was reminded of Cyrano's virtuoso speech on his nose. But it is one thing to introduce such dazzle into a swashbuckling romantic comedy; it is quite another to have it performed by people in extreme circumstances. Instead of reflecting on the danger they are in, Stoppard's characters concentrate on balances and antitheses or piling up adjectives in front of nouns. What we have here is less stage dialogue than a kind of bel canto, where people take breaths not to admit the air of reality but rather to prepare themselves for more exhalations of claustral wit. (pp. 23-4)