Stoppard's 'Indian Ink' leaves indelible mark
NEW YORK — Is there a writer with a more insatiable mind or heart than Tom Stoppard?
In play after play, he has tackled subjects ranging from chaos theory and the philosophical underpinnings of the Russian Revolution to marriage and adultery with both a ferocious intellectual dexterity and a depth of human feeling that can make you laugh or move you to tears.
Like a number of Stoppard's previous works, Indian Ink (***½ out of four stars), which opened off-Broadway Tuesday at the Laura Pels Theatre, considers how personal, political and historical developments intersect and inform each other. It shifts between 1930, when a beautiful, free-thinking British poet named Flora Crewe travels to India, and the '80s, long after her death, as her now-elderly kid sister, Eleanor Swan — played by the great Rosemary Harris, with a perfect balance of starch and tenderness — meets two younger men who share an interest in Flora's legacy.
One is a scholar who has already published Flora's collected poems, and is now seeking access to her letters, among other items that will provide a fuller portrait of the young woman who once raised eyebrows in London's literary circles. The other man is an artist, whose father, also an artist, is referred to in one of Flora's correspondences as "my painter."
We get to know the painter, Nirad Das, as he and Flora get to know each other, during an Indian spring in which the visiting Englishwoman, who is actually very ill, is at once suffocated and aroused by the unfamiliar heat — the subject of an erotic poem she writes in Nirad's presence.
The attraction and strain between the potential lovers is reflected in events unfolding around them, in the movement for independence from the British empire. Flora is frustrated by Nirad's careful formality and deference, which she attributes to cultural influences, but he is prouder than he initially seems; as both Flora and Eleanor will discover of different generations, Indian attitudes toward the English are more complicated than sheer devotion or defiance.
Firdous Bamji's gorgeously nuanced performance as Nirad makes the actor a standout even in the flawless cast of this Roundabout Theatre Company production, directed with easy warmth and probing intelligence by Carey Perloff. Bamji's delicate, hesitant movements convey the sensitivity of an artist and a gentleman, but he also projects a simmering virility that reveals Nirad as more than just those things.
Romola Garai, similarly, gives Flora a haunted, fragile edge without suppressing the blazing vitality that is her essence. Sharp-witted and romantic, sensual and curious, the character provides an ideal vehicle for Stoppard's piercingly beautiful, expressive language.
Flora's final letter offers an image of Radha, the Indian deity, "undressed for love in an empty house." It's a reference to an earlier exchange, and bears the mark of a playwright who can provoke and move us as few others can.