Watching Tom Stoppard’s “Indian Ink” spill out onto a stage offers a rare sort of theatrical pleasure. It’s a British Raj romance with brains and a misty quality, infused with the most reliable wit of any living dramatist.
Even Stoppard’s less momentous works (he described “Indian Ink” as “very cozy . . . no ranting or storming around”) feel absolutely right in the right production. Apple Tree’s Midwest premiere is the right production, a fine go at a 1995 play that received its American premiere in San Francisco, a production bigger than this one, but not better.
The play travels on two tracks, one in 1930 India in the fictional “native” state of Jummapur, another in 1980s England. Stoppard’s protagonist is a scandalous, sensually adventurous British poet, Flora Crewe (Susie McMonagle). In frail health but good spirits she has traveled to India to lecture on London’s literary scene.
In Jummapur she meets a painter, Nirad Das (Anish Jethmalani), an Anglophile who seems to know more about London and the Bloomsbury gang than does Flora. Das commences painting Flora’s portrait, with Flora at her writing desk, struggling with an erotically charged ode to the Indian heat. The two discuss the Indian concept of rasa, the juice or essence any work of art should spark in the observer.
In the 1980s, meantime, Flora’s surviving sister Eleanor (Peggy Roeder), is paid a visit by a somewhat credulous literary scholar, Eldon Pike (Paul Slade Smith). Pike is collecting the Flora Crewe letters. “This is why God made poets and novelists,” he explains. “So that the rest of us could get published.”
There’s a cryptic reference in one letter to what might have been a nude portrait. In its relaxed, assured way “Indian Ink” reveals the circumstances behind the painting, while following Pike to India in the ’80s, as he stumbles through his literary and artistic treasure hunt.
Stoppard’s “Arcadia” dealt with similar themes as well as a two-century span, and in his gentle skewering of academics, “Indian Ink” relates to the later work “The Invention of Love,” along with earlier Stoppard plays. Yet “Indian Ink” doesn’t feel like a recycled set of themes. Stoppard’s gently balanced discussions of the waning British empire — gentle enough, presumably, to drive a seething polemicist like David “Plenty” Hare plenty nuts — fold artfully into one woman’s passage to India. In Stoppard’s musings there’s a whiff of the pleasures of good old-fashioned civilized imperialism, as well as the cost of such political legacies. At a moment in history when the threat of nuclear call-and-response hangs over India, “Indian Ink” feels like a planet far, far away.
At 2 1/2 hours, director Mark E. Lococo’s Apple Tree staging runs a full half-hour shorter than the U.S. premiere did in San Francisco. The 11-person cast relishes this material. McMonagle is terrific as Flora, embodying a woman whose life, from one perspective, is one long flirtation walk. Yet there’s gravity and a searching quality to Stoppard’s enchanting character, and as the wide-eyed, hair-bobbed, extremely skillful McMonagle plays her.
She’s well supported by, among others, the Indian-born actors Parvesh Cheena (as Pike’s guide) and Kamal Hans (as the Rajah smitten with Flora); Indian-American actor Jethmalani, who was the standout in the recent Shaw Chicago staging of “The Millionairess”); and, as Anish Das, the Burmese-Filipino performer Mark Nathan. Roeder is marvelously snappish and affecting as Eleanor, unapologetic defender of the empire and a crafty, watchful bird. Everyone’s good, in fact. If some of the guys’ interplay lends an unwanted adolescent quality to the evening, the upside is a sense of dispatch and forward momentum.
Stoppard is exploring the nature of biographical truth in “Indian Ink,” along with rasa and the Raj. “Indian Ink,” a revision and vast improvement on Stoppard’s radio play “In the Native State,” is a fragrant, eloquent story about a poet’s too-short life in progress, and how that life looks, decades hence, while looking through a mesh.
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“Indian Ink”
When: Through July 21
Where: Apple Tree Theatre, 595 Elm Place, Highland Park
Phone: 847-432-4335
