What makes Tom Stoppard tick?

Slate Magazine: "The first part of Tom Stoppard's epic 2002 trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, opened yesterday at New York's Lincoln Center, and his new play, Rock 'n' Roll, continues its run in London. In an 'Assessment' published in 1999 and reprinted below, A.O. Scott argued that the playwright was ultimately more of an entertainer than a revolutionary artist. Scott concluded, 'What we get is mostly less than meets the eye: the erudition of the cocktail party and the emotional range of a good TV sitcom, middlebrow pleasures dressed up in the trappings of high learning—modernism without difficulty. Stoppard is often called a playwright of ideas, but he is more accurately a playwright of the idea of ideas.'"