Stoppard spent the next few years enjoying his success and overseeing productions of "Enter a Free Man" (the reworked version of "A Walk on the Water") and the one-acts "The Real Inspector Hound," "After Magritte" and "Dogg's Our Pet," as well as a few works for radio and TV, but he didn't produce another full-length play until "Jumpers," in early 1972. The play, which tackles ethical questions, took him two years to write, much of which he spent reading and researching. He sought to ensure that his insights "weren't simply the average conclusions of a first-year philosophy student," he told the Times of London in 1972, "which indeed they invariably turned out to be."

Colleagues compare Stoppard's relatively slow writing speed to that of a student cramming for an exam, and he himself admits that his process is anything but effortless, as he once told Time magazine:

I half commit myself to some distant future date. I often talk to someone about it and suggest that in six months it will be done, so I set up a kind of deadline. But most of the intervening period disappears in a kind of anxious state of walking about. You cannot start until you know what you want to do, and you do not know what you want to do until you start. That is Catch-22. Panic breaks that circle. Finally a certain force in the accumulated material begins to form a pattern.

Stoppard, who has been married twice and has four sons, two from each marriage, says he works best when his personal life is stable and serene. But he wrote "Jumpers" during the breakup of his first marriage, to nurse Jose Ingle (whom he married in 1965, separated from in 1970 and divorced in 1972). The playwright got custody of the couple's young sons and married again in 1972, this time to Miriam Moore-Robinson, the head of a pharmaceutical company and something of a U.K. celebrity in her own right; the two divorced in 1992.

"Jumpers," which wittily explores man's place in a universe beyond his control, was mounted at the Old Vic in late 1972. It cemented Stoppard's theatrical reputation and proved he was more than a one-trick pony. The radio play "Artist Descending a Staircase" followed later that year, introducing two themes to which Stoppard has returned over the years: the elusive nature of truth and the purpose of art.

With "Travesties" (1974), Stoppard began to address the role of politics in art. This was a departure for the playwright, a self-described conservative who had always striven to exclude politics from his plays for fear it cheapened the work. His plays, he wrote at the time, "must be entirely untouched by any suspicion of usefulness. I should have the courage of my lack of convictions."

Nevertheless, both of Stoppard's next two plays, "Every Good Boy Deserves Favor" (written with Andre Previn) and "Professional Foul," addressed human-rights issues. The latter focused on freedom of speech in Czechoslovakia, reflecting the fact that each play is a product not just of its time, but of a particular time in the playwright's life. In 1977, Stoppard traveled to the Soviet Union and several Eastern European countries with a member of Amnesty International. In Czechoslovakia, he met playwright and future president Vaclav Havel, who had been imprisoned for nonconformism. Struck by what he saw, he subsequently worked with "Index on Censorship," Amnesty International and the Committee Against Psychiatric Abuse, and he began to write newspaper articles and editorials about human rights.

Around this time, Stoppard's work shed some of its self-consciousness and explored more deeply his characters' emotions -- though he continued to plumb morality, art and other ideas. His play "Night and Day" (1978) tackled the moral responsibilities and practical shortcomings of a free press. "The Real Thing," first performed in 1982 and generally considered one of Stoppard's best works, took on love, commitment and the place of art in society.

With "Hapgood" (1988), Stoppard melds the drama of a spy story with ... physics. A double agent is like an electron, Stoppard posits, because trying to find out one's side changes the results. Clearly, Stoppard's dramatic exploration of wave/particle duality paved the way for his next big hit, "Arcadia," which opened in London in 1993.

In his latest play, "The Invention of Love," currently enjoying a successful run on Broadway, he delves deeper than ever into the personal implications of love. The play centers on A.E. Housman, the homosexual English poet and scholar who died in the '30s, never having allowed himself to fulfill the unrequited love of his youth. Stoppard sets Housman's temperate life against that of his contemporary, Oscar Wilde, who was tormented and reviled for his homosexuality, but who allowed himself to love at all costs. No matter that the two Victorian authors very likely never met.

"It's a dream play, so it's not literal biography," Stoppard recently commented. Wilde proposes that "one falls in love with somebody whom one has helped invent," Stoppard explains, adding that he himself is "not sure" he agrees with the contention that has inspired the play's title.

And herein lies an element of Stoppard's genius: Refusing to offer you a single pat lesson spoken by a character who serves as the play's moral authority, Stoppard requires his audience members to piece together their own conclusions. "I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself," he has said. "I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation."

But above all, Stoppard never loses sight of the play's obligation to entertain. His comedies may "make serious points by flinging a custard pie around the stage for a couple of hours," but he's ever mindful that theater is "first and foremost a recreation."

So as you laugh, you learn. As you listen, you question. And as you stretch your mind, you may feel something akin to love.

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