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.)
