It’s hard to assess the current Roundabout
production of Tom Stoppard’s 1995 play Indian Ink (receiving what is, in any
meaningful way, its first NYC production), because it’s hard to assess whether
director Carey Perloff has hit
the right tone or whether he’s a bit sidelined by a script that, while more
than entertaining, is not one of Stoppard’s best or best constructed.
It’s
about a period in 1930, in which our heroine, a renowned poet named Flora Crewe
(Romola Garai) visits India for her
health, but winds up staying for reasons of cultural fascination and possibly
romance with a local artist (Firdous Bamji).
The play, set in two timelines, gives us the narrative from the perspective of
her existing diaries and how people in the 1980s—in particular the sister
who survived her (Rosemary Harris),
an awed historian (Neal Huff)
and the now-deceased artist’s son (Bhavesh Patel).
I
think the play means to show how a very human story is subject to
reconstruction when it can only be told through evidence that survives, and how
that evidence can be subject to radically different interpretations; at the
same time, though, Stoppard doesn’t truly explore distortion, the story he
gives us seems real enough—he just winks at us with the odd wrong guess
or two, or the enigma that doesn’t matter or change things very much. So while
there’s a sweetness to the central story, it seems light; and the framework not
very resonant as commentary and retrospection.
As
with most of Stoppard’s plays, there’s no denying you’re in the hands of a
master dramatist, and the performances are all fine, some of them very much
more than that, so I don’t at all mean to dissuade you from attending. But the
purpose of the endgame seems as amorphous as the debatable details.
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