From Tony Award-winning playwright Tom Stoppard, Indian Ink is a rich and moving portrait of intimate lives set against one of the great shafts of history-the emergence of the Indian subcontinent from the grip of Europe. The play follows free-spirited English poet Flora Crewe on her travels through India in the 1930s, where her intricate relationship with an Indian artist unfurls against the backdrop of a country seeking its independence. Fifty years later, in 1980s England, her younger sister Eleanor attempts to preserve the legacy of Flora's controversial career, while Flora's would-be biographer is following a cold trail in India. Fresh from the critically acclaimed off-Broadway performance in 2014, Indian Ink is reemerging as an important part of Stoppard's oeuvre and the global dramatic canon, a fascinating, time-hopping masterwork.
"A play brimming with rasa . . . [Indian Ink] encompasses broad themes-from the morality of colonialism to our inability to truly understand the past-at the same time that it relates one of the most touching tales of human relationships Stoppard has ever written."
Baltimore Sun
"A lot of bases for one play to cover. As is his wont, Mr. Stoppard touches on them all, running from one to the other and back again, with great speed and alacrity . . . There's plenty to cherish . . . An expansion of Mr. Stoppard's earlier In the Native State, a 1991 radio play, Indian Ink retains vestiges of a form that is as satisfactorily heard as it is seen . . . As usual, Mr. Stoppard is in
Ben Brantley, New York Times
"A provocative character study . . . novelistic in scope. The novelist I have in mind is Henry James, who worked similar turf in The Aspern Papers . . . A fascinating premise."
