Writer: Tom Stoppard
Director: Jonathan Kent
Sometimes Tom Stoppard makes you work hard for your tears. His characters can feel like vessels for erudite ideas, their inner emotional lives kept at arm’s length. You admire the structural ingenuity and the brilliance of the language while waiting to feel something. Occasionally, you never quite do. Thankfully, there is little such difficulty in Jonathan Kent’s moving and efficient revival of 1930 and 1980-set Indian Ink, the third in Hampstead Theatre’s sequence of Christmas Stoppard revivals.
Context matters. Stoppard died only weeks ago. In the final scene, Felicity Kendal (Stoppard’s sometime lover and the play’s original muse) stands before her character’s grave, quietly wondering whether she will be remembered as anything more than “a smudge of paint on paper”. The programme includes a remark from Stoppard urging us to remember that “time’s going by, you only get one chance”. The coincidence is stark and unavoidable. You would need a heart of stone not to feel the emotional charge.
The emotional heft comes, too, in the cleverly evoked central relationship between the consumptive, dying poet Flora (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis) and the Indian portrait painter, and her probable lover, Nirad (Gavi Singh Chera, sharp, angsty, with tremendous stage presence).
In lesser hands than Ashbourne Serkis, Flora might be a kind of Stoppardian aesthetic contrivance: a witty, doomed, sexually liberated heroine who has met (and possibly bedded) Modigliani, HG Wells, and Gertrude Stein. She burns brightly, speaks with impeccable precision, and dies young. Her mourning sister tells us that Flora “used men like batteries, when things went flat, she put a new one in”, which seems an understandable, if caustic, summary.
Thankfully, Ashbourne Serkis brings bristling life to Flora, who is undertaking a journey through colonial India for her health, combining soft vulnerability with a grotesque (to our eyes) ignorance of her white privilege. “We were your Romans, we might have been your Normans”, she insists by way of defending the British Raj.
On arrival in the sleepy princely state of Jummapur, Flora unsettles the pompous, wife-hungry British administrator, David (Tom Durrant-Pritchard), who jokes that “Polo and knives and forks are all you need to govern India”. She also bedazzles the car-crazy local Rajah (Irvine Iqbal), but it is with painter Nirad that she finds a real, if coyly understated, connection. The duo find a cross-cultural connection through two of Nirad’s portraits: the first, a demure, unfinished study of Flora writing poetry and epistolatory letters home; the second, a mysterious nude miniature “in the Rajasthani tradition”.
The dodgy power politics of a wealthy white woman enchanting a colonial subject, whose fascination with Dickens, Robert Browning and Agatha Christie battles with a growing conviction that the Brits really should not be there, are mostly sidestepped. The wider Indian fight for freedom from colonial oppression is treated as an offstage inconvenience rather than with urgency. Both elements may feel oddly outdated to some, and the too-kindly retrospection towards Empire feels redolent of the late 1980s, in which Indian Ink’s second narrative strand is set.
In the second strand, Flora’s elderly sister and guardian of many of the poet’s effects, Mrs Swan (Felicity Kendal alternates between acidity and spritely good humour), is living in her dotage in Shepperton. “A reservoir near Staines is never going to have the makings of a good cup of tea,” she bemoans as she settles in her garden to tea and two types of cake. A visit from Eldon Pike (Donald Sage Mackay), a bombastic American academic, intent on writing Flora’s biography, ensues. “Biography is the worst possible excuse for getting people wrong,” Mrs Swan tells him, decrying his attempt to impose coherence and causality on a life that was messy and probably unknowable. Nirad’s son, Anish (Aaron Gill), also arrives bearing the painting of the nude Flora and keen for a more personal understanding of the connection between his father and the poet.
Stoppard cross-cuts between the 30s romance and its 1980s academic and familial dissection with predictable expertise, though the play’s origins in radio are clear, and there is little by way of humour. Kent gives his characters little to do aside from sitting and talking (and one powerfully intimate nude scene), which works fine on Radio 4 but less so on stage; perhaps he thinks Flora’s epistles home are enough to tell us what is going on.
Designer Leslie Travers sets the action in a square garden edged in blue, evoking a sense of a comfortable milieu set apart from its surroundings: apt for a play that ought to be skewering colonialism more than it does. This is not Stoppard’s finest work, and the production is solid if not revelatory, but you cannot doubt the emotional heft here.
Runs until 31 January 2026
