TOM Stoppard’s play Indian Ink, first seen in 1995, comes to Bath after a short season at the Hampstead Theatre. Directed with a meticulous and playful eye by Jonathan Kent, it once again stars Felicity Kendal, the actress for whom the central character, avant garde 1920s poet Flora Crewe, was written. Now she plays Flora’s sister, looking back to 1930 from the “present day”.

This may have been the first time that Stoppard, whose writing career started on the Bristol Evening Post, used the mechanism of interweaving time periods to tease out the background of a story, introducing a researching literary editor as his detective. It was a method he used again to great effect in Arcadia, with which Indian Ink shares both structure and brilliance.

The story is of poet FC, diagnosed with TB and prescribed rest and warmth, upping sticks from a scandalised London literary circle to India, at the suggestion of a Communist colleague. There she rapidly discovers artistic riches and a literary heritage she never suspected.

We watch, by turns enchanted and occasionally shocked – largely through Flora’s eyes – as Stoppard skewers the dictatorial and patronising carelessness of the British colonisers, underlining the massive contribution that India made not just to the prestige of England as the Jewel in the Crown of the Empire, but to our language, food, art … and so much more.

This perfectly-paced retelling gently unfolds the growing friendship between Flora and the Indian painter Nirad Das, as well as her frustration, both with the native clerks with their caste-concious brutality to the lower orders and fawning obeisance to their “superiors”, and with the casual arrogance of the various British soldiers and civil servants still herding their recent “subjects.”

Into the role written for Kendal entrancingly steps Ruby Ashbourne Serkis. Her Flora is a charmingly iconoclastic, determined delight, never wavering from her plan to see and observe as much as is possible in the short time she knows she has left. Gavi Singh Chera’s Nirad Das paints a heartbreaking picture of conflicting rebellion, tradition, reticence and love. The scene where they come together, even after an open discussion of the graphic details of Indian erotic art, is heart stoppingly beautiful and exquisitely timed, silencing and stilling the enraptured audience.

The 13-strong cast, playing on a versatile set designed by Leslie Travers and lit by Peter Mumford, evoked a spirit of India familiar from the films of Merchant-Ivory, but analysed by the clear and free-thinking FC and her soon-to-be revolutionary portraitist.

Felicity Kendal, a favourite with Bath audiences, returned to the play written in her honour, this time as the elderly widowed sister of FC. Her Mrs Swan and FC were certainly sisters, sharing a light but astringent humour, taking life as it comes and seeing clearly through pretension and smug arrogance. Theirs are jewell-like performances in a brilliantly crafted play.

Last December at the Hampstead Theatre, the revival of Indian Ink opened four days after the playwright’s death. Both Stoppard and Kendal, partners for years, lived in India as children, and took with them indelible memories of their experiences.

In these days when the preference seems to be for short plays without intervals, lots of squealing and whooping and the audience leaping to its collective feet the moment the lights go down, this production is a wonderful reminder of just how powerful a play can be, given its due weight and time to develop, without an inbuilt eye to the bar profits or a deal of look-at-me selfie time. ( I love that my auto-correct changes “selfie” to “senile”.)

GP-W

 

Photographs by Johan Persson