If The Coast of Utopia is an opera cycle, and Arcadia a symphony with complex counterpoint, then Indian Ink is a refined chamber work, whose delicate music is easy to miss and overlook. In a world of screeching headlines and implacable polarisation, its oblique and careful commentary on difficult issues of memory, decolonisation and identity is much more revealing than many plays that aim to confront such themes with bludgeoning directness. Moreover, its warmth and emotional subtlety is a welcome reminder that the frequent criticism of Stoppard’s cool intellectual gymnastics is based on a restricted and highly selective overview of his oeuvre.
For the duration of the action the stage is divided between India and Shepperton, though sometimes the sets merge and overlap, reflecting perhaps the supple origins of the work in a radio play. We oscillate between the events of 1930 and their recollection in 1990, until, just before the end, the two rather wonderfully merge. First we meet Flora Crewe, an unconventional and unwell poet, as she visits the princely state of Jummapur for a speaking engagement, before heading on upto the hills for her health. In Shepperton, that same sequence of events is scrutinised through the memories of her younger sister, now an elderly pensioner, and the different agendas of her visitors, one an academic, the other the son of an Indian painter who created a portrait of the poet all those years ago. In the meantime the Raj has given way to India, and Flora Crewe has been elevated to the literary canon as a proto-feminist and modernist pioneer.
The emotional and moral register in play here is more The Jewel in the Crown rather than A Passage to India. This is the story of the epic moments experienced and remembered (or misremembered) within ordinary lives, rather than a grandiose parable of Empire. There are musings on the instability and mutations of personal and national identity, and the implausible abuses of them perpetrated by pedantic academics – this a long-standing theme for Stoppard. There are insightful commentaries on different types of creativity and their sources, and some exquisitely dramatised, suspenseful moments of sliding-doors intimacy, when with a different word or inflection another outcome would be equally possible. Of course, as always with this author, there is wit and word-play and cross-cultural learning in abundance, but it is all very much in service to the drama.
This is a large and capable cast, and a brief review can only single out a few striking performances. Ruby Ashbourne Serkis has the brisk, confident charm, sensual boldness, emotional carelessness and way with words needed to bring Flora to life, and Gavi Singh Chera matches her well as the painter Nirad Das, conflicted between an Indian background and aspirations and a developed English education and acculturation. As Mrs Swan, the younger sister, Felicity Kendal is both sweet and steely, in disconcerting but convincing combination. She brings to the part her unique experience of playing Flora in the first production. Donald Sage Mackay is very funny as the intrusive academic, Eldon Pike, popping up around the auditorium as an unreliable narrator; and Tom Durant Pritchard finds unexpected depth in the part of the repressed and lonely Deputy Resident.
Director Jonathan Kent and designer Leslie Travers have created an evocative set filled with lush vegetation and indicative, minimalist architectural features that allows the action to flow naturally from one era and location to another with winning, sometimes dreamy conviction. You are not aware of the literal passage of time even as you are swung back and forth from the last days of the Raj to Thatcher’s Britain. The story and the symbolism hold you in their winning grip.
This is the last theatrical venture in which the author played a part. As you enter the theatre foyer there is currently a projection of a quote from The Invention of Love: ‘Thou shalt be a song sung unto posterity so long as earth and sun abide.’ Indian Ink certainly deserves a permanent place as a verse in that everlasting song, and offers an appropriate many-sided salute to its author just a month after his passing.
Writer: Tom Stoppard
Director: Jonathan Kent
Cast includes: Sagar Arya, Mark Carlisle, Gavi Singh Chera, Neil D’Souza, Tom Durant-Pritchard, Aaron Gill, Irvine Iqbal, Felicity Kendal, Donald Sage Mackay, Evan Milton, Bethany Muir, Sushant Shekhar, Ruby Ashbourne Serkis
Until 31 January 2026
2 hrs 45 mins, with interval
Photo Credit: Johan Persson