Enter Eldon Pike (Colin Stinto), the satiric embodiment of earnest American academe, who arrives at Eleanor’s west London home to prepare a collection of Flora’s letters only to get hung up on mysterious references to the “Queen’s elm.” (It is, he learns in a joke London audiences will see coming a mile away, merely a Chelsea pub.) (The two get a contrived exchange about “Passage to India,” lest the would-be affinities go unannounced.)Īs it happens, Stoppard is interested less in Forsterian metaphysics - there’s no equivalent of the Marabar Caves in “Indian Ink”– than in the foibles of academic sleuthing shared by “Arcadia.” Flora, it seems, has passed into literary legend, particularly in the United States. Peggy Ashcroft’s elegant reading of Eleanor on radio - her final performance - amplified the scripted echoes of “A Passage to India” and “The Jewel in the Crown” (among many others), and the stage presence of “Jewel” co-star Art Malik as a painter called Das, keen to capture Flora on canvas, does the same again. Stoppard being Stoppard, “Indian Ink” encompasses numerous topics before collapsing the decades, “Arcadia”-style, for an unmoving graveside finale featuring yet another cumbersome Carl Toms set.

(“Write what you know,” she jokes.) Kendal’s brief nude scene may make convenient British tabloid fodder, but it cannot alone convey what the script omits: the galvanic force of an artist who obsesses both her aging sister Eleanor (Margaret Tyzack), as well as the literary and academic worlds, some half-century after her death. Were her death not telegraphed from the start, Stoppard would have no play the character - and a miscast Kendal’s winsome playing of her - are crucially lacking in either a creative or erotic dimension, notwithstanding the fact that Flora’s principal topic seems to have been sex. But whereas that work folds the fate of the teenage prodigy Thomasina into an ever-deepening study of chaos in all its manifestations, the doomed poet Flora Crewe (Felicity Kendal) in “Indian Ink” is of next to no interest beyond her unfortunate consumptive demise, even if she did brush up during her 35 years against the likes of Modigliani, Shaw, Alice B.

The pathos seems especially canned coming after “Arcadia,” another play whose (far younger) heroine dies before her time.

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