Can men really love each other – without sex? Or, to put it another way, how many different forms of male love can you name? These questions loiter with intent around the edges of Tom Stoppard’s dense history play, which jumps from 1936 to the High Victorian age of the 1870s and 1880s, and is now revived by the Hampstead Theatre starring Simon Russell Beale.

When it was first produced in 1982, The Real Thing was a turning point for Tom Stoppard, the play that added to the existing perception of him as an immensely witty, intelligent, very theatrical crafter of dazzling conceits, albeit perhaps a little cold, as someone who could also touch people’s emotions: clever, still, but cutting to the heart. 

The difference was simple, really: Stoppard had always been driven by the desire to explore ideas; this time his idea was love. 

There is a song by Syd Barrett, founder member of Pink Floyd, called “Golden Hair”. It’s on his album The Madcap Laughs, released in 1970, a couple of years after he left the band, and every time I hear it I feel like I’m falling in love again. It also features in Tom Stoppard’s 2006 epic, the aptly named Rock ’N’ Roll, now revived at the Hampstead Theatre by playwright and director Nina Raine.

"The older he got, the less he cared about self-concealment," or so it is said of Sir Tom Stoppard, somewhere deep into the 865 pages of Tom Stoppard: A Life, Hermione Lee's capacious (to put it mildly) biography of the British theatre's leading wordsmith.

I am fortunate to have worked as a director in theatre, film, television and radio, and so it was hugely intriguing to be invited to direct an online reading of Tom Stoppard’s beautiful 1964 play, A Separate Peace.

It’s not uncommon for playwrights to begin their careers by writing what they know, to co-opt a frequently quoted precept about authorial inspiration. So it’s among the many fascinations of Leopoldstadt that Tom Stoppard, at the age of 82, should have written his most personal play and also, very possibly (and sadly), his last.

To the list of abiding theatrical partnerships one must surely add Tom Stoppard and the director David Leveaux. From his Tony-winning revival of The Real Thing onwards to Jumpers and Arcadia, all of which played both London and Broadway, Leveaux has proved a particularly dab hand at mining this playwright in all his near-infinite variety.

Tom Stoppard’s humungously funny play Travesties was born out of a piece of James Joyce doggerel about how a British diplomat sued him for the cost of two pairs of trousers. It’s like this.

Is this the most dazzling play of a dazzling playwright? First staged in 1974, Travesties is the one which manages to squeeze avant-garde novelist James Joyce, Dada godfather Tristan Tzara and communist revolutionary Lenin into a story which resembles a riotous party, where Wildean pastiche, political history, debate about art, unreliable memory and song-and-dance routines stay up half the night, and howl gloriously at the moon.

A supposed Stoppardian footnote gets a first-class reclamation in Howard Davies's sizzling revival of Hapgood, the espionage-themed drama from 1988 that resonates intellectually and emotionally to a degree it didn't begin to achieve at a West End premiere that I recall almost three decades on.