Theatre in Review: Indian Ink (Roundabout Theatre Company/Laura Pels Theatre)

	: Rosemary Harris, Romola Garai, Bhavesh Patel. Photo: Joan Marcus

In Indian Ink, Tom Stoppard invents a minor literary mystery and then solves it, taking he his sweet time in doing so; the result is sometimes intriguing and touching but often rather sluggish. It is typical Stoppardian fare -- learned, time-traveling, full of characters who insist on having their say at length, and equally concerned with questions of art and history and the implications of Britain's once-great empire for both. An intermittently gripping work, it is overstuffed with ideas and underpopulated by believable people.

Stoppard builds his mystery around Flora Crewe, a poet who, in 1920, achieved a succès de scandale with a volume called Nymph in Her Orisons, nearly getting her publisher convicted of obscenity. (Regretfully recalling her saucy behavior on the witness stand, she says, "The magistrate asked me why all the poems seemed to be about sex, and I said, 'Write what you know.'") Ten years later, creatively blocked and afflicted with an unspecified lung disease, she radically misinterprets her doctor's advice -- to take a voyage somewhere warm -- and heads for Jamalpur, India, where, despite the punishing heat and humidity, she seeks fresh inspiration. She gets it, along with a cagey, semi-romantic flirtation with a portrait painter named Nirad Das; a marriage proposal from a British official; and a potentially scandalous meeting with a rajah. She also reaches the end of her life.

In the 1980s, we meet Eleanor Swan, Flora's sister, now in her mid-70s and serving tea and cake to two very different interlopers with a strong interest in Flora. The first guest is Eldon Pike, an American academic and the driving force behind what you might call the Flora Crewe industry; having produced the standard edition of her poems, he is now assembling her collected letters. All of this is fine with Eleanor, who wants Flora to be remembered. ("Nobody gave tuppence about her while she was alive except to get her knickers off," she notes with some bitterness.) But Eldon also wants to write Flora's biography, an exercise that Eleanor wants no part of. "Biography is the worst possible excuse for getting people wrong," she says, a comment that could have come from Arcadia, another Stoppard play about the way we misunderstand the past.

Eleanor also plays host to Anish Das, Nirad's son and himself a painter, although, he takes great pains to point out, "not an Indian painter, particularly." Eleanor had previously been given Eldon Nirad's portrait of Flora, which now graces the cover of Flora's collected letters. Anish, stunned to see one of his father's works in a bookstore window, has approached Eleanor to learn more about it.

And, if you can decode it, the painting reveals much about the emotionally fraught relationship between artist and subject. But there are other paintings, too, scattered throughout the narrative, each with its own meaning: they include a nude of Flora, painted by Modigliani and destroyed by her jealous fiancé, and an erotic painting given to her by the rajah. And is it also possible that there is another nude of Flora, painted by Nirad in defiance of his Hindu religion and social customs? It's an intriguing question, because the relationship between Nirad and Flora is the key to her last poem, written not long before her death, as well as her last letter for Eleanor.

The action follows several tracks at once: In Jamalpur in 1930, Flora debates art and empire with Nirad while fending off suitors, colonial officials, and sycophantic members of the local branch of the Theosophical Society. In the 1980s, Eleanor conceals facts from Eldon and spoon-feeds information to Anish, while conducting her own argument with the latter about Britain and India. And Eldon, aided by Dilip, a Jamalpur native who teaches English, searches through the noise, traffic, and new construction for evidence of Flora's time there. It is Dilip who first reveals that Nirad, following his time with Flora, acquired a reputation for sedition, having been arrested for hurling a mango at a British official's car.

As he methodically assembles the pieces of his puzzle, Stoppard provides plenty of tartly amusing observations. Flora, nonplussed by her reception in Jamalpur, comments, "I felt like a carnival float representing Empire, or, depending on how you look at it, the Subjugation of the Indian People." Casting a cold eye on the insular, self-regarding members of the local British club, she says, "I wouldn't trust them with the Hackney Empire." She and Nirad play a game in which they try to work as many pidgin words into a single sentence. ("I was buying chutney in the bazaar when a thug escaped from the choky and killed a boxwallah for his loot, creating a hullabaloo and landing himself in the mulligatawny.")

And in its best moments Indian Ink explores the enduringly mixed results of the British Raj, which has profound effects on colonist and native alike. Anish makes a reference to "the rising of 1954," and Eleanor, herself an old India hand, responds, "Oh, you mean the Mutiny." The rajah warns Flora, "Independence will be the end of the unity of the subcontinent," as Hindus and Muslims turn against each other. Nirad says that, with so many nationalities and languages, the only language spoken by all in India is English. Dilip, noting India's enduring cultural debt to its occupiers, says, "Forty years of independence and we are still hypnotized! Jackets and ties must be worn! English-model public schools for the children of the elite, and the voice of the BBC is heard in the land. Gandhi would fast again, I think." Anish, married to an Englishwoman, has become more British than Indian; similarly, David, Flora's British suitor, has a deep feeling for the country he occupies. Even Eleanor slips and refers to it as home, even though she has spent her retirement in England.

Then again, Stoppard's fascination with his material, his desire to explore every possible viewpoint, and his dogged pursuit of several different lines of inquiry, results in a diffuse dramatic structure. And, in the last analysis, the revelations about Flora are mildly intriguing at the most. This is linked to the play's major weakness, that it is populated by pale, pasteboard creations who exist principally as mouthpieces for various points of view. We are meant to see Flora as a boldly independent mind housed in a failing body, but her illness never seems to be anything but an authorial device; except for the odd spell of gasping, she appears to be in the rudest of health. Eldon is a too-easy satire of a gushing academic on the hunt for literary big game; other writers have nailed this sort of character much more amusingly. And when we learn Eleanor, now the most conventional of Englishwomen, once toiled on a communist publication and carried her married lover's child, the information beggars belief. Her comment, "that it goes to show that people are surprising," isn't quite good enough.

More damagingly, Flora's friendship with Nirad never really catches fire; their freewheeling conversations should be underlined by a sense of suppressed emotion, especially on his part, that never fully materializes. This points to the real problem with the play, which can be summed up in a remark made by Nirad about the Indian concept of Rasa: "Rasa is juice," he says, "Its taste. Its essence....Rasa is what you must feel when you see a painting, or hear music; it is the emotion which the artist must arouse in you." Rasa, I submit, is the very thing missing from Indian Ink, despite its many fascinations.

Still, Carey Perloff's smartly cast and beautifully designed production has enough going for it that Indian Ink is often enjoyable, even when it is headed in no particular direction. In her New York stage debut, Romola Garai makes of Flora a most convincing intellectual swashbuckler; you can totally believe that she has carried on with H. G. Wells and inserted herself into circles populated by the likes of Nancy Cunard and the Sitwell siblings. She is especially good at suggesting the hard work of writing. Firdous Bamji portrays Nirad with considerable delicacy and tact, creating a man who is irretrievably torn between two cultures. Bhavesh Patel makes a very strong impression as Anish, who gives as good as he gets in his polite battles with Eleanor. Lee Aaron Rosen charms as David, whose British stoicism is so ingrained that he proposes to Flora while riding on horseback, taking her rejection without flinching. And Rosemary Harris is nothing less than superb as Eleanor, who knows far more about Flora than she is willing to admit and who makes every remark and proffered slice of cake into a canny chess move.

Faced with designing a play that roams across continents and centuries, Neil Patel has created an attractive set dominated by a blue stucco upstage wall filled with windows that, when backlit, create a fragmented image of a starry night sky. A pair of trees, painted onto the walls, adds a sense of location, as does a proscenium decorated in the Indian style. Robert Wierzel's lighting creates a variety of hot, sun-splashed afternoons and moon-washed nights. Candice Donnelly's costumes are equally apt for both of the play's time frames, especially some gorgeous gowns, marked by bright colors and filmy fabrics, worn by Flora and the ladies of the British club. Dan Moses Schreier provides an array of sound effects -- bells, horses, and car traffic -- as well as original music that covers a variety of eras and styles.

This represents the first time that Indian Ink, which is nearly 20 years old, has been seen in New York. This isn't surprising; for all its size and breadth, it must count as a minor Stoppard work. (Roundabout is running it alongside a Broadway revival of The Real Thing, one of his most popular plays.) Nothing wrong with that -- we can't expect him to turn out The Coast of Utopia or Rock and Roll every time. But with its elaborate, yet lackadaisical, plotting and multitude of talking points, it might have made a better novel. As it is, it doesn't add up to a fully realized drama. By the end, you will realize the meaning of Flora's last letter; whether you think it was worth the trip is a 50-50 proposition.--David Barbour