[Stoppard] is at his strongest when one precise meaning is transformed into another precise meaning with the context full-blown in each case. It is an elementary point to prove that a word can mean anything we choose it to mean. Many of us must have sometimes felt, when reading the later Wittgenstein, that he is not really saying anything about words which Lewis Carroll didn't say equally succinctly. The later Wittgenstein is in this regard the obverse of the early one, only instead of saying that a word is attached to something in the world he is saying that it is not. The early position refuted itself, and the later one needs no proof—artistic endorsements of it are doomed to triviality.

But Stoppard is not really concerned to say that words can mean anything…. It is the plurality of contexts that concerns Stoppard: ambiguities are just places where contexts join. And although Stoppard's transitions and transformations of context might be thought of, either pejoratively or with approval, as games, the games are, it seems to me, at least as serious as Wittgenstein's language games—although finally, I think, the appropriate analogies to Stoppard's vision lie just as much in modern physics as in modern philosophy.

Even among those who profess to admire his skill, it is often supposed that there is something coldly calculated about Stoppard's technique. By mentioning his work in the same breath with modern physics one risks abetting that opinion. But there is no good reason to concede that modern physics is cold, or even that to be calculating precludes creativity. Guildenstern is not necessarily right when he tells Rosencrantz (in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) that all would be lost if their spontaneity turned out to be part of another order—one of the play's themes is that Chance, while looking deterministic if seen from far enough away, is random enough from close to. Both views are real…. It could even be assumed that each viewpoint is fixed. That would be a Newtonian picture of Stoppard's universe, and like the Newtonian picture of the real universe could go a long way towards explaining everything in it.

But physics, to the small extent that I understand it, ceased being Newtonian and started being modern when Einstein found himself obliged to rule out the possibility of a viewpoint at rest. Nobody could now believe that Einstein did this in order to be less precise—he did it in order to be precise over a greater range of events than Newtonian mechanics could accurately account for. Mutatis mutandis, Stoppard abandons fixed viewpoints for something like the same reason. The analogy is worth pursuing because it leads us to consider the possibility that Stoppard's increasingly apparent intention to create a dramatic universe of perpetual transformations might also spring from the impulse to clarify.

It is perhaps because there is little recognisably mystical about him—scarcely a hint of the easy claim to impenetrability—that people are inclined to call Stoppard cold. It might have been a comfort to them if Stoppard had rested content with merely saying: listen, what looks odd when you stand over There is perfectly reasonable if you stand over Here, whereupon the place you left begins looking odd in its turn. That would have been relativity of a manageable Newtonian kind, which anyone patient enough could have hoped to follow. But Stoppard added: and now that you're Here, you ought to know that Here is on its way to somewhere else, just as There is, and always was. That was Einstein's kind of relativity, a prospect much less easily grasped. In fact grasping doesn't come into it. There is not much point in the layman trying to grasp that the relative speed of two objects rushing away from each other at the speed of light is still the speed of light. What he needs to realise is that no other explanation fits the facts. Similarly with Stoppard's dramatic equivalent of the space-time continuum: it exists to be ungraspable, its creator having discovered that no readily appreciable conceptual scheme can possibly be adequate to the complexity of experience. The chill which some spectators feel at a Stoppard play is arriving from infinity.

Critical talk about "levels of reality" in a play commonly assumes that one of the posited levels is really real. By the same token, it would be reasonable to assume that although everything in a Stoppard play is moving, the play itself is a system at rest. But in Stoppard's universe no entity, not even a work of art, is exempt from travel. The Importance of Being Earnest is moving through Travesties like one stream of particles through another, the points of collision lighting up as pastiche. The same kind of interpenetration was already at work in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, through which the play Hamlet made a stately transit like a planet encountering a meteor shower, and with the same pyrotechnic consequences. (pp. 70-2)

In a body of work which is otherwise conspicuously impersonal, Albert [in Albert's Bridge] is probably the character who comes closest to representing Stoppard the artist. Albert is at a point detached enough for arbitrariness to look like order. Fraser, Albert's opposing voice, might usefully be held to represent Stoppard the man—Stoppard when he is not detached. Fraser lives down among the chaos, where he sees it to be a sheer fluke that the right number of people who do not want to milk cows do want to fill teeth and vice versa. Finding the perception intolerable, he chooses suicide. But climbing the bridge in order to jump off it, he sees things from Albert's viewpoint, loses the desire to die, and goes back down, where he sees it to be a sheer fluke that the right number … and so on, in a reticulation as endless as painting the bridge. Neither Albert nor Fraser can be right alone.

Here and now in Stoppard is a time and place defined by an infinite number of converging vectors each heading towards it at the speed of light and steadily slowing down to nothing before passing through it and speeding up again. Ignoring for the moment that the still point is itself moving, here and now is what things tend towards, with a tantalising slowness as they swell into proximity. In this resides much of the significance of Stoppard's fascination with Zeno's paradox—the asymptotic frustration by which the hare never quite catches up with the tortoise. In Jumpers, George Moore the philosopher (the other George Moore the philosopher) concludes that since the arrow could not have quite reached Saint Sebastian he must have died of fright. It is a fabulous joke but there is fear in it—the awe of watching a slow approach down long perspectives.

Guildenstern says that the more witnesses who attest to the remarkable the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is thin as reality. Here and now is Zero—a word which rings like a gnomic tocsin in Beckett's Endgame and arrives in Stoppard's plays as a developed vision. (The word itself passes through like a micro-meteorite during the Farjeonesque game of bridge in The Real Inspector Hound.) Stoppard has gradually become more and more capable of bodying this vision forth, but the vision was there at the beginning of his drama and indeed before the beginning. In his novel Lord Malquist and Mr Moon, Mr Moon is sick with his secret knowledge of the long perspectives, just as Rosencrantz feels sick when he looks into the audience (an echo, but more than an echo, of Clov's similarly bleak gaze in Endgame), or Gladys the TIM girl feels sick when she looks down the well of time in the radio play If You're Glad I'll Be Frank. But not even madness can make a coherent whole of all Moon sees. Moon is appalled by the shift of a glacier that leads to a man straightening his tie. "But if it's all random", he asks Lady Malquist, "what's the point?" And when she replies "What's the point if it's all inevitable?" he can't deal with the answer. (pp. 72-4)

From Enter A Free Man to Travesties is a long way. Stoppard's habit of cannibalising old situations to make new ones tends to suggest repetitiveness but really he has been expanding his scope all the time. Take the meticulously extended preparation for the gag about the Rule Britannia clock in Enter A Free Man. In that apprentice work such devices are at first sight tangential enough to seem merely cosmetic. But hindsight reveals that they constitute the play's real originality. Otherwise the plot is like one of Ibsen's turned on its head, with the daughter continually telling her father the truth about himself, instead of the saving lie. The eccentric atmosphere suggests Saroyan's The Time of Your Life, which in its turn was more solidly in the Broadway tradition than people thought at the time. If Stoppard had never written anything subsequently, we might think of Riley's indoor rain as being a nod to N. F. Simpson, and the concern with Time to be like J. B. Priestley's, or Christopher Fry's, or, at best, T. S. Eliot's. But in retrospect the architecture looks like decoration and the decoration looks like architecture.

In all the subsequent plays the texture is composed entirely of interweaving preparation. By the time of Jumpers it takes the whole play for the separate stories of the tortoise and the hare to catch up with each other—Zeno's paradox resolved at the intersection of long lines of coincidence. And in Travesties we find the long lines turning into curves, the planes curving into spheres, and the spheres making music.

And if the music of the spheres sounds cold, would it be more convincing if it sounded warm? There is abundant evidence in Stoppard's plays to show that he is as capable of emotion as anybody. In Enter A Free Man Linda is a finely tuned moral invention whose equivalents we might well miss in the later plays, if we really thought they should be there. The mainspring of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is the perception—surely a compassionate one—that the fact of their deaths mattering so little to Hamlet was something which ought to have mattered to Shakespeare. And in the radio play Where Are They Now? there is a flaring moment of generous anger against the school system which turned childhood into a hell of pointless competition. "Where are they now?" people ask about all those young winners, and Gale, putting things in perspective on behalf of all the losers, bitterly asks "Where were they then?"

There is plenty to indicate that if Stoppard had done no more than employ the drama as a vehicle for moral messages he would still have been a force in the theatre. The playwrights who grapple with those issues supposedly too weighty for Stoppard's frivolous talent are likely to have been inspired by a view of their task which is not only less comprehensive than Stoppard's but less penetrating. Stoppard leaves them behind not because he can't do what they can do, but because he can do what they can do so easily. (p. 74)

At their best, Stoppard's heady dramatic designs impress us not as deliberately sophisticated variations on the reality we know but as simplified models of a greater reality—the inhuman cosmos which contains the human world, the amoral vastness in which morality is a local accident, the totality from whose perimeter we look like—Zero. ("Nothing", Lord Malquist tells Mr Moon, "is the history of the world viewed from a suitable distance.") Stoppard's triumph—which he does not share with Priestley, Fry or Eliot any more than he shares it with Star Trek or Dr Who—is to have created this impression not through vagueness but through precision…. If his speculative scope recalls modern physics, his linguistic rigour recalls modern philosophy. It is a potent combination whatever its validity.

And if the whole vaultingly clever enterprise turned out to be merely intuitive—well, what is so mere about that? It might be only in Stoppard's enchanted playground that the majestic inevitabilities of General Relativity can be reconciled with the Uncertainty Principle or quantum physics, but Einstein's lifelong search for the Unified Field was the same game, and he believed in intuition. He also believed in Einfühlung—the intellectual love for the objects of experience. Just such a love, it seems to me, is at work in Stoppard's writing, lending it a poetry which is as far beyond sentimentality as his ebullient detachment is beyond the arrogant solipsism which commonly passes for commitment. (pp. 75-6)