BelSoc Chair, Prabhat Vaze writes:
For the third consecutive year, Hampstead Theatre has ended the year with a Tom Stoppard production. Indian Ink — a play that moves between 1930s India and 1980s England, showing how a life is rewritten through memory, biography, scholarship and gossip — follows Rock ’n’ Roll and last year’s The Invention of Love. Staged just months after Stoppard’s death, the production by Jonathan Kent is a poignant reminder of his distinctive blend of wit and argument. It also casts Felicity Kendal, for whom the original radio play was commissioned, as the elderly Mrs Swan, recalling from the 1980s the story of her younger sister Flora Crewe — the role Kendal herself played in 1991.
Both leads excel, and the casting of Felicity Kendal carries extraordinary resonance. Thirty years on, she now plays the figure who controls how Flora is remembered, mirroring the play’s own movement from experience to recollection. Opposite her, Ruby Ashbourne Serkis brings youth and impulsiveness to Flora, creating a visual and emotional echo alongside the older sister who remembers her.
The play unfolds through two interwoven timelines and two vividly realised settings, with England and India conjured with striking economy on stage. There are themes familiar to North London audiences, with Flora Crewe firmly placed within a Bloomsbury-inflected literary world; but in India we encounter the idea of rasa (literally “juice”), explained by the painter Nirad Das, played by Gavi Singh Chera. Art, he suggests, must be tasted rather than analysed. In this way, Indian Ink quietly aligns itself with Bloomsbury’s distrust of tidy explanations, preferring the truth of a fully lived life.
On a Belsize stage, Indian Ink confirms Hampstead Theatre’s continuing role as a local home for excellent plays that invite thought, debate and return visits.
Photos of Felicity Kendal and Ruby Ashbourne Serkis with Gavi Singh Chera by permission from Hampstead Theatre
