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Indian Ink, Stoppard's 1995 play just now receiving its big-time New York premiere (it played Off-Off-Broadway 11 years ago) courtesy of Roundabout at the Laura Pels Theatre, spins this theme every bit as expertly, cleverly, and poignantly as the similar Arcadia and The Invention of Love, adding in a vibrant extra dose of color courtesy of the joint settings (colonial India in the 1930s, both India and England some 50 years later) and a compelling story that critiques the very concept of knowingness: What can you actually know when the only fluid thing about reality is what you know? Answering that question is, here, a sumptuous and invigorating journey through the foggy life of Flora Crewe, a British poet touring India while in the throes of tuberculosis. In one half of the dramatic landscape, we see Flora (Romola Garai) arriving in the land and making the acquaintance of men as diverse as the president of the theosophical society, Coomaraswami (Ajay Naidu); the representative of the English residency, David Durance (Lee Aaron Rosen); the Rajah himself (Rajeev Varma); and, perhaps most interestingly, the painter Nirad Das (Firdous Bamji). Nirad is the closest to her, and the most fascinated with her—feelings that echo through the decades to come when people in the modern day are attempting to piece together what Flora did. Chief among these is her surviving sister, Eleanor (Rosemary Harris), who's working with a scholar of Flora's work, Eldon Pike (Neal Huff), on assembling and publishing her collected letters. (He already did her poems.) But Anish Das (Bhavesh Patel), Nirad's son, also a visual artist, arrives bearing evidence that most of what they know and believe about Flora's activities in India may not be entirely correct. What follows is a delightful entanglement of writing and painting, as Flora's verse and Nirad's portraits filter down through the years, leaving their precise meanings utterly open to interpretation (and, more important, misinterpretation). Stoppard manages, as only he can, to weave enormous tension about the specific intentions behind a phrase of writing, or the unusual style used in what later becomes an integral piece of the puzzle: a rendering of a realistic flora, nude, amid the glorious excesses of a vivid Indian backdrop.
Which is why it's a shame to report that this Indian Ink has not received a production dynamic and emotionally gripping enough to match the writing. Director Carey Perloff has effected a vicious clash of styles that makes it seem as though you're watching several very different plays instead of one cohesive exploration of biographical uncertainty. The primary feature of Neil Patel's set is a sweeping plaster temple wall, apparently designed as though to look like a stylized representation of India you might find in a globe-trotting animated series, with candy-colored lighting (by Robert Wierzel) to match. Candice Donnelly's costumes likewise evoke the troubling sense of being familiar but not quite real. Then there are the actors. Harris is, as is typical, superb at finding shaded nuances within her lines, and she winningly blends a love of what's evaporated with an acceptance of what Eleanor has left, naturalistically encapsulating both the 1930s and the 1980s in her performance. Patel is her strongest costar, playing Anish as a sharp adversary who effectively rebuts Eleanor's one-sided view of colonialism while uniting with her appreciation of the work of both Flora and his father. But Garai, though committed, plays Flora as a cartoon floating through exoticism, not a deceptively earthy creature who belongs in India more than anyone expects. Huff is glaringly broad as Pike, capturing all the character's irritating qualities but none of his leavening good-naturedness, making the character, during his best moments, a buffoon. Though Bamji works strenuously to stay focused he, like most of the other actors playing the Indians then and now, play as refugees from a sitcom set in Bombay rather than as serious people with drives of their own. This greatly unbalances the play, and causes it to lurch between comedy and drama as though it's caught within a three-hour tremor. A consistent, clear vision for fusing the periods is required; because Perloff doesn't provide it, her production never emits the full power it should, or move you when doing so should be a snap. A play this fascinating can, to some extent, get away with failing to engage your heart and your mind at the same time. But the raw materials are there, waiting to be shaped, but ultimately forced, like the truth of Flora and Nirad, to be something the facts don't support. Maybe it is impossible to know much for sure, but it's easy to see how this Indian Ink fades out far too soon.
Indian Ink
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