This revival of a typically elegant but second-rank play by Tom Stoppard, about a free-spirited female poet’s adventures in British-occupied India in 1930, has gained new poignancy following his recent death. Partly it’s the presence of Stoppard’s sometime muse and flame Felicity Kendal, who was raised in India and for whom he wrote the central role of Flora Crewe in 1995; in Jonathan Kent’s production here, Ruby Ashbourne Serkis is Flora and Kendal plays her elderly, surviving sister Eleanor in the parallel narrative set in Shepperton in the 1980s. Partly it’s the awareness that, for better or worse, they don’t make ‘em like this any more.
Indian Ink is a romance. It’s in love with its protagonist, with the artistic whirl of the interwar years (HG Wells, Gertrude Stein and Modigliani are all namechecked) and with the intriguing clash between Indian and English culture. Based on a 1991 radio play, winkingly titled In the Native State, it hinges on whether Indian artist Nirad Das (Gavi Singh Chera) painted a nude of – and therefore probably had an affair with – Flora.
