Tom Stoppard, in Loving Memory

My family and I were living in London, in the spring of 1973, when I had to make the trip personally to purchase tickets for Tom Stoppard’s play, Jumpers. It was the play’s first performance, with Diana Rigg in the lead. On the way over the next day with my wife, I couldn’t quite recall the path to the theater from the train. I told my wife that we would simply follow another couple from the train—an academic-looking pair, with gray flecks in their hair. Sure enough, they led us straight to the right place. When a play has audiences elbowing one another as they laugh at jokes about “logical positivism,” the kind of people drawn to such entertainment can be identified fairly easily on public transport.