A Smudge of Paint on Paper: A Master Revises his Play

I’d never before seen Tom Stoppard’s Indian Ink, so I read it ahead of the new production at the Hampstead Theatre. Written around the same time as Arcadia, it touches on some of the same concerns, particularly Stoppard’s suspicion of scholars who confidently gather the traces of their subjects’ lives into interpretive edifices of biography. Hermione Lee—Stoppard’s own very fine biographer—notes that this was also the moment when Stoppard himself began to worry about how his life would be told.

Like Arcadia, Indian Ink tells its story via two time frames. A young and tubercular Bloomsbury poet, Flora Crewe, goes to India for her health (“Have you seen the British Cemetery?” asks the incredulous British Resident’s attaché.) On the other side of the stage, we see in the present day her surviving sister, now an elderly woman, providing tea and cake to the bumptious American biographer who presses her for more information about the poet who died young in India.

In India, Flora sits for an Indian painter, Nirad Das. Their relationship is ambiguous — charged with cultural misunderstanding, eroticism, and genuine affection — but it never resolves into the sort of affair a biographer could comfortably label, nor does it even lead to a finished portrait. Or so it appears. One of Flora’s letters hints that there may be an unknown, perhaps nude portrait.

The American biographer desperately tries to find the painting her letter refers to, no doubt convinced it will provide the key to understanding her life. But Stoppard knows better. There are no simple keys to understanding a life, just as there is no one key to understanding a play. Even plays as weighted with ideas as Stoppard’s are not to be reduced to lessons about colonialism or Indian painting traditions or anything else. Like a life, a good play leaves behind feelings that cannot be reduced to any single interpretation.

The emotional center of Indian Ink confirms this. Late in the play, the younger Eleanor visits her sister’s grave in India a year after Flora’s death. Standing behind her, unseen, is the older Eleanor watching her bereft younger self.

When the younger Eleanor leaves the grave with the man we realize will become her husband, the older Eleanor remains. Widowed now, alone, she gazes at the grave in silence. I found my tears coming, feeling the death of young Flora and the grief left behind.

The moment is already powerful, but it carries an added resonance in this production. Felicity Kendall, who originated the role of Flora Crewe in 1995 when she was also Stoppard’s partner, now plays the older Eleanor. Stoppard, of course, died just before the production opened. The coincidence collapses time in just the way the play does: youth and age, presence and absence, love and survival come together for us as we watch.

It’s here, as we come to the end of the play, that I was taken aback. In the published text I had dutifully studied, Stoppard ends the play with Flora’s voice reading from Emily Eden’s Up the Country. The passage is an ironic comment on the British colonial presence in India. It’s an ending that gestures outward, toward history and empire, and away from the woman whose life we have been following.

But that passage was omitted from this production. Instead, the play closes with Flora’s own words, from a late letter written as she faces death. She speculates on what, if anything, might remain of her.

“Perhaps my soul will stay behind, as a smudge of paint on paper, as if I had always been here. Like Radha, the most beautiful of the herdswomen, undressed for love in an empty house.”

We had heard of this letter back in the first act, and it’s what convinces Eldon Pike, the biographer, that a nude portrait of Flora must exist. We learn—though Pike doesn’t—that there really is such a portrait. But portrait or no, what matters here is Flora’s tentative hope that something of her will remain, not just the poems she’s written for public consumption, but something far more intimate.

I only learned later, when I read an interview in the program, that Stoppard had already begun reworking Indian Ink’s conclusion during his collaboration with Carey Perloff on a revival at the Roundabout Theatre. It was years ago, then, that he chose to focus the play’s ending on the emotional state of the protagonist, rather than on a clever observation about British colonialism.

Stoppard is often criticized for overintellectualizing, for keeping feeling at arm’s length. Here he perhaps takes that criticism to heart, revising this play to ensure that we end not contemplating an empire that soon will fall, but feeling the death of a woman we’ve come to care for.

The original ending is provocative and witty, but perhaps emotionally evasive. It retreats into irony at the moment when we need to mourn for Flora and hope, along with her, that some bit of her—just a smudge on paper—will remain.