Tom Stoppard has remarked that there is ‘a deep suspicion among serious people of comic situations. The point is that good fun is merely frivolous.’ Attacked by Edward Bond for being ‘a clown in a charnel house’, he was seen by some as unwilling to take seriously those issues which they saw as critical to the moment. Of his own work he remarked ironically, ‘I used to have a redeeming streak of seriousness … and now I have a redeeming streak of frivolity.’ In fact, Stoppard has, throughout his career, been a moralist and if he has admitted to a lack of interest in either plot or character, on occasion switching lines from one character to another, he has been concerned to question the nature and extent of human freedom and (in Night and Day, Hapgood and The Invention of Love) the centrality of love. The fact that he is equally dedicated to humour should not deceive us into believing that he lacks moral concern.

Though Wendy Wasserstein comes from another tradition she shares both his confessed disabilities (also admitting to weaknesses of plot and, like Stoppard, transposing lines) and his wit, while suffering the same suspicions. She, too, if equally ironically, could claim that she has moved from seasoning comedy with seriousness to redeeming seriousness with wit. Certainly the gag-a-minute delivery of Uncommon Women and Others and Isn't It Romantic gives way to the more measured ironies of The Heidi Chronicles, The Sisters Rosensweig and An American Daughter.