On a sticky August day in London 23 years ago, I walked into the Royal National Theater with glazed eyes, a heavy tread and what felt like an unconquerable weariness. I was fresh — or rather stale — off a plane from New York, and before me lay nine-plus hours of people with unpronounceable names talking about Russian history.

A picture of me, unidentified, appeared in The Evening Standard the next day, sitting in the audience behind a reporter who was writing about how to survive the event in question: the marathon performance of Tom Stoppard’s trilogy about the ideas behind the Russian Revolution, “The Coast of Utopia,” which was officially opening that day. I looked close to dead.

That was taken before 11 a.m. If I had been photographed again that night, walking along the Thames 12 hours later, you would have seen an improbably energized man, who looked as if he’d just fallen in love. Wouldn’t you know it? Stoppard’s words had cured me of terminal jet lag.

I should have known that would be the case, of course. The language of Stoppard — the Czech-born British dramatist who has died at 88 — has always affected me like an intravenous cocktail of adrenaline and endorphins.

He may well have been the most prolix playwright in the English language since George Bernard Shaw, as he wrestled with subjects that were, if not arcane, then unusually academic by most standards. The play that made his name, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” (1966), retold “Hamlet” from the point of view of two inescapably marginal characters in that tragedy. And his penultimate work, “The Hard Problem” (2015), debated the nature of consciousness itself.

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