Sir Tom Stoppard, England’s leading playwright of champagne wit and ideas, stands loftily alone in theater, Oscar Wilde not having written much lately. The great man met me for a light lunch at Orso, the showbiz hangout in the heart of Broadway, during a break from rehearsing the revival of his Tony Award-winning 1982 play, The Real Thing. (It’s opening next month and starring Ewan McGregor, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Cynthia Nixon, who played the teenager in the original production.)

A congenial, reserved, charming man, he still loves the unequaled, frenetic excitement of Broadway, less so its pneumatic drills. “It will be lovely once it’s finished,” he said. It would be perfect, one suspects, if they let him smoke. “Tut-tut, Tom,” I ventured. “You still smoke?”

“I know. It’s very tut-tut, isn’t it? But I do.” How many a day? “I don’t know that I want to share all my most intimate secrets.”

He deflects, nicely. When his first full-length play, the Beckettian Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, became a sensational success in the late 1960s, he was asked what the play was about. “It’s about to make me very rich,” he replied.

The last time we met, he said that he had recently given up writing with a quill because his last goose had died. He still doesn’t use a computer. “This is the inverse vanity of it. I proudly tell people I have no computer so as not to be ashamed of having no computer.”

He writes by pen—a stylish, silver Caran d’Ache fountain pen, made in Geneva. He’s grown accustomed to its nib. His personal assistant of 40 years, Jacky Matthews, has the computer. She has typed all his plays (and screenplays), which he then keeps re-writing by hand in a roundelay between them. His diplomatic P.A. has therefore always been his first audience.

“She’s been very scrupulous about not commenting on them,” he said. “But after about 30 years I began to wonder whether she thinks they’re any good.” He didn’t want to put her on the spot but recalls going on a fishing expedition. “A decade ago she grudgingly started to make favorable comments from time to time—and I perk up enormously!”

He scanned the menu indecisively, settling on only a first course of yellowfin tuna tartare with a cappuccino. “That would be perfect, thank you.”

He was born Tomas Straussler, in Czechoslovakia, in 1937, and arrived in England via Singapore and India when he was eight. He has always said that England is his great stroke of good fortune. The English tend to distrust intellectuals—but not Tom Stoppard. His current bedside books that he listed for me tell a lot about his catholic interests: The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science, by Armand Marie Leroi; Zia Haider Rahman’s novel In the Light of What We Know; Nick Davies’s Hack Attack: The Inside Story of How the Truth Caught Up with Rupert Murdoch; and he’s rereading Doctor Zhivago because he read Isaiah Berlin’s recollection of Edmund Wilson’s thoughts about Dostoyevsky, which made him want to look at Pasternak’s novel again.