Indian Ink

There may be a big Old Vic revival of Arcadia just around the corner, but it does feel a bit odd that this is the first production of a Tom Stoppard play since his death at the end of November. For the last three years Hampstead Theatre has been staging lesser-revived Stoppards over Christmas, and for Stoppard fans it’s been fun to see them come to life. But Indian Ink is a deep cut. A vehicle for his former partner Felicity Kendal, Stoppard wrote it first as a radio drama called In the Native State and then expanded and enriched it into this version, which premiered in 1995. Reviews didn’t rave about it back then, and never really have since, and Jonathan Kent’s production doesn’t get around the problems that, despite moving moments, remain in the bones of the play.

Split across two(ish) timelines, it tells the story of poet Flora Crewe: first we meet her in India in 1930 where she encounters local painter Nirad Das, who does a portrait of her while she is slowly dying from TB; second, sixty years later, Flora’s ageing sister Mrs Swan reflecting on her letters with an academic trying to write a biography, as well as Das’s son Amish.

Ruby Ashbourne Serkis plays Flora with an accent that could cut diamond – think Kiera Knightley but posher – Bette Davis eyes and the kind of easy grace that throws back to golden age Hollywood stars. She’s breezy, sexually free, with a huge smile. It’s a very strong lead performance. While she romanticises India – blithe about the brewing tensions of Gandhi’s Salt March – painter Nirad Das loves everything English and wants to paint her in an English style.

Designer Leslie Travers puts them in a pretty house with jasmine and ivy clinging to the walls, while Kendal on the other side of the stage inhabits a lush country garden. The whole stage is surrounded by blue light, like watery ink.

Stoppard’s stage version never quite escaped its origins as a radio play. In the first scene, Flora narrates one of her letters, and describes everything that’s on the stage in front of her. Most scenes have no motion, and Kent doesn’t seem to know what to do with the characters except have them sit and watch the other ones give speeches. Most of those speeches are about what it means to ‘be English’ or ‘be Indian’ and how that gets expressed in art, and you can sense Stoppard calibrating his own identity (born in Czechoslovakia, moved to India, grew up in England) within that.

He intelligently pre-empts some of the culture war conversations that have heated up in the three decades since the play was written, especially around what we’d now call cultural appropriation, as well as the clash of sensibilities about the Raj: the English civilised ignorant people who needed civilising, is Mrs Swan’s view; ‘did you expect us to be grateful?’ retorts Anish, as he eats a piece of the Victoria sponge she has made him.

And it’s just like Stoppard to write a play with footnotes, as Donald Sage Mackay’s enthusiastic academic occasionally appears spotlit to contextualise bits of the letters that Flora reads out. But the fact is this isn’t quite as dense in its ideas or constantly witty in its lines as Stoppard’s better plays.

What redeems it is the emotional resonances that find their way from the outside world into the play: here is Felicity Kendal returning to Indian Ink so many years later, but playing the elderly Mrs Swan rather than the young Flora Crewe. And in a play about looking back, and the lives of artists, and making sense of past romances, she watches Ashbourne Serkis bring alive the lines written for her by her old lover just weeks after his death. That in itself is very moving, even if the play remains one for the Stoppard pilgrims.