Following its run at Hampstead Theatre, Indian Ink will also play Theatre Royal Bath from 10th to 14th February.
The death of an 88-year-old should come as no surprise, but when Tom Stoppard died in November, people reacted as if he had been a man half his age.
It seemed inconceivable that such a vast intellect should vanish overnight. Yet the plays he left behind keep that intelligence alive, and that’s the magic – the alchemy – of theatre.
A novelist’s work lives on, but only in the imagination of the reader. A playwright’s work is embodied by living, breathing actors. Watching this Stoppard play, on the day of his funeral, I had an odd sensation he was here among us – exactly the sort of metaphysical oddity he loved exploring in his plays.
That this particular play should be the first to be performed since Stoppard’s death is fitting. It’s a play with a personal genesis, about the land of his early childhood. It’s an elegiac, wistful drama about youth, old age and memory – about that intimate yet distant relationship between our younger and our older selves.
Stoppard wrote Indian Ink for Felicity Kendal, with whom he had a long and deep romance. Stoppard spent his early years in India during the war. Kendal grew up there, the daughter of a peripatetic actor-manager (an upbringing that inspired the Merchant Ivory movie Shakespeare Wallah).
The play is about two sisters – one we meet in the summer of her youth, the other in the winter of old age.
In 1995, in the première of this play, Kendal played the young woman, Flora Crewe. Now, 30 years later, she returns to play the old woman, Flora’s sister, Nell. It’s a fascinating (and eerie) instance of the close interplay between art and life.
The year is 1930. Flora, an up-and-coming English poetess, has come to India for the sake of her health. She’s suffering from tuberculosis (still largely incurable in the 1930s), and her doctor has recommended a long sea voyage and a warm climate.
It’s an eccentric choice (as she’s warned on her arrival, in India Englishmen are dropping like flies), but she’s an eccentric character – fiercely independent, with attitudes to romance and friendship that are way ahead of their time.
Inevitably, almost every man she meets falls hopelessly in love with her – and who can blame them? In this constricted colony, she’s a free spirit, a breath of fresh air. Yet Flora, the most lively character in this drama, is dying. She teaches these men how to live by herself living each day to the full.
Her two suitors are David Durance, an affable British officer, and Nirad Das, a passionate and tortured Indian painter. This triangle encapsulates the tangled relationship between Britain and India, two lands closely intertwined yet worlds apart.
For most writers, this would be quite enough for one play, but Stoppard dovetails Flora’s story with the story of her younger sister, Nell, and it’s this clever counterpoint that makes his drama sing. Half a lifetime later, back in Blighty, two men come knocking on Nell’s door, eager to read the letters Flora sent home to her kid sister, and to see the two pictures Nirad painted of her – a portrait and a nude.
Ruby Ashbourne Serkis is full of life and joy as Flora, and Gavi Singh Chera is a suitably intense, angst-ridden Nirad. Yet the performance that transfixed me was Kendal’s – discreet and unobtrusive yet bursting with concealed emotion.
Her tender portrayal of an elderly widow, haunted by two ghosts – her dead sister, and the woman she used to be – will linger in my memory for a long time.
Are there any blemishes? Well, as Michael Billington observed, reviewing Hermione Lee’s biography of Stoppard in The Oldie, ‘If Stoppard has one big flaw, it is that his research sometimes sits on top of the play, rather than being embedded in the action.’
That’s a problem here. The discussions about the relationship between Britain and India are rather tedious, and entirely unnecessary, since Stoppard makes the same points far more eloquently in the relationships between his characters.
But that’s a minor quibble about a superb play, blessed with a subtle production by Jonathan Kent, which doubles as a sort of eulogy. The final image, of the older and the younger Nell standing side by side at their sister’s grave, should be intolerably grim yet, like all great playwrights, Stoppard transforms it into something beautiful.
RIP.
