“It’s like going home,” says Felicity Kendal, as she takes a seat in a Hampstead Theatre dressing room. “And it’s one of the few plays I thought when I was doing it, ‘Ooh, I could come back to this.’”
The play in question is Tom Stoppard’s Indian Ink, a drama which like so much of the great playwright’s work swings across time periods, blurring the edges between past and present, playing out events and then refracting them through memory.
In Indian Ink we switch between 1930s India, where a free-spirited poet, Flora Crewe, forges a relationship with a painter, and 1980s England, where her sister, Mrs Swan, fends off a beady would-be biographer of the now deceased Flora.