A fortnight after West End playhouses dimmed their lights in tribute to Sir Tom Stoppard, Hampstead theatre’s stage lights rise on 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 startlingly so: Indian Ink concerns literary posterity. About Flora Crewe, an Edwardian poet who travelled to India, critics get most things wrong, a crassness represented by Eldon Pike, an American academic, editing Crewe’s correspondence and planning a biography that Stoppard makes clear will be disastrously false and gossipy. (He was much luckier with Hermione Lee.)
In mid-1980s scenes, Pike pesters Flora’s surviving sister, Eleanor Swan, for the letters and poems we see her writing 50 years earlier, while she is painted by a young artist, Nirad Das. Indian Ink grew from a radio play, its title In the Native State a very Stoppardian pun encompassing both the painting of nudes and the regions of British India permitted some self-government – both pivotal to the story.
Indian Ink shows these radio origins in metronomic cross-fades between places and dates. The double time-scheme and fretting about historical forgetting are better done in Arcadia. However, helped by being a Czech émigré with an Indian childhood, Stoppard fairly referees between the politics and history of coloniser and colonised.
Something critics got wrong about Stoppard even in his lifetime was the idea that head trumped heart but, even in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead almost 60 years ago, the key title word was the last. Indian Ink has deep notes of grief and love, which Jonathan Kent’s production sounds 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 of two periods and Donald Sage Mackay’s Pike amusingly pops up all around the auditorium, putting his footnotes in it.
Ruby Ashbourne Serkis is amusing and moving as Flora, doomed with literary and sexual sensibilities ahead of her times, but the core draw is Felicity Kendal, the Flora on Radio 3 and in the stage premiere, who graduates to Mrs Swan (played previously by Peggy Ashcroft and Margaret Tyzack.)
Stoppard’s text is dedicated to Felicity’s mother, Laura, a lover of India and theatre, and, at risk of going full Eldon Pike, we may suspect that the daughter’s quick switches between steeliness and sweetness in the role draw on the female clan DNA. A performance that would be formidable in any 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, this must have risked fiction-fact fracture. But her courageous craft and the skill of the whole team give a fitting first epitaph performance to a dramatist whose loss is keenly felt in theatre generally but particularly at this one now.
