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Last week on my way to karate training, I saw a good-looking gentleman dressed impeccably whose eyes were fixed on some building at 72nd and Park. I stopped and said hello. It was Sir Tom Stoppard, not only our greatest living playwright, but along with Sir Terence Rattigan the greatest the 20th and 21st centuries have produced. Sir Tom has the ease of manner of the real aristo, friendly and always curious. He didn’t interrupt my soliloquy on how the city’s being destroyed, but he looked amused at how angry it made me. The irony was, ten minutes before that I had been writing about him and Terence Rattigan, and then in a city of eight million people I ran into him gazing at some edifice.

The Winslow Boy was splendidly revived a couple of weeks ago over here, and I enjoyed it as much as I always have. Rattigan set his plays in the languid manner of the time. A critic for The New York Times praised it but wrote that the pace at times was slow. To the contrary. Woody Allen’s jokes need pace; Rattigan’s art does not.

The other thing that got on my nerves was the critic’s objection to the “postal order” and to the “five shillings.” Was the critic trying to establish his anti-imperial credentials by pleading ignorance to what a postal order is and to what five shillings are? No, I don’t think so; even a New York Times employee must have heard of them, but it’s not a cool thing to know. Cricket and all that, when dark people were called darkies, white people ordered them around, and we knew what was good for them. Better plead ignorance and all that.

Stoppard and Rattigan: our two greatest, both knights, one heterosexual and the other homosexual, but only one still with us. For me Arcadia is the most flawless play ever. I remember seeing Travesties back in 1974 or so and thinking, “Now why didn’t I think of that?” Well, that’s an easy one. Wit and comedy and philosophy need rare talent to mix successfully—none of that kitchen-sink crap. Give me Rattigan and Stoppard and I’ll even take the new horrors of London and New York.