Indian Ink Review – Felicity Kendal is formidable in Tom Stoppard’s emotional epitaph | Theater
A A fortnight after West End theaters dimmed their lights in tribute to Sir Tom Stoppard, the stage lights at Hampstead Theater come on during a revival of his 1995 play Indian Ink, originally intended to mark 30 years since the play’s premiere.
The first production after a playwright’s death is always poignant, but in this case it is so in a surprising way: Indian Ink is about literary posterity. About Flora Crewe, an Edwardian poet who traveled to India, the critics get most things wrong, a crudeness represented by Eldon Pike, an American academic, who edits Crewe’s correspondence and prepares a biography that Stoppard says will be disastrously false and garrulous. (He had much better luck with Hermione Lee.)
In scenes from the mid-1980s, Pike harasses Flora’s surviving sister, Eleanor Swan, for the letters and poems we see her writing 50 years earlier, while being painted by a young artist, Nirad Das. Indian Ink grew out of a radio play, its title In the Native State, a very Stopparian play on words encompassing both nude painting and the regions of British India, allowed for a degree of self-governance – both essential to the story.
Indian Ink shows these radio origins in metronomic crossfades between places and dates. The dual temporal pattern and concern for historical oblivion are best realized in Arcadia. However, aided by his Czech émigré with an Indian childhood, Stoppard arbitrates fairly between the politics and history of the colonizer and the colonized.
Something that critics got wrong about Stoppard, even during his lifetime, was the idea that the head trumped the heart, but, even in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead almost 60 years ago, the key word in the title was the latter. Indian Ink has deep notes of heartbreak and love, which Jonathan Kent’s production rings perfectly from a cast in which Gavi Singh Chera is powerful as Das, who can love an Englishwoman but not the British. Irvine Iqbal smoothly doubles Indian leaders from two periods and Donald Sage Mackay’s Pike amusingly appears all around the auditorium, putting in his footnotes.
Ruby Ashbourne Serkis is amusing and moving as Flora, condemned to literary and sexual sensibilities ahead of her time, but the main attraction is Felicity Kendal, the Flora on Radio 3 and in the stage premiere, who transitions to Mrs Swan (previously played by Peggy Ashcroft and Margaret Tyzack.)
Stoppard’s text is dedicated to Felicity’s mother, Laura, a lover of India and the theater, and, at the risk of going completely Eldon Pike, one might suspect that the girl’s rapid shifts between poise and gentleness in the role draw on the DNA of the female clan. A performance that would be formidable in all circumstances is even more so in these. The climax requires Kendal to stand at the grave of a renowned writer and, so soon after the death of the former partner who wrote the scene, it must have risked shattering fiction and reality. But her courageous talent and the skill of the entire team provide a fitting first epitaph for a playwright whose loss is keenly felt in theater in general, but particularly in this one now.
