Felicity Kendal and her co-star Ruby Ashbourne Serkis talk to David Jays about remounting Tom Stoppard’s Indian Ink.

Settling into a squishy brown sofa at Hampstead Theatre, Felicity Kendal describes revisiting the 1995 work, developed from a 1991 radio play. “It’s a play that I always thought I’d like to go back to.” Previously starring as Flora Crewe, a provocative British poet visiting 1930s India, she now plays Eleanor Swan, Flora’s sister. We meet Eleanor in the 1980s, fending off an intrusive biographer but uncovering her sister’s rapt and nuanced relationships in India.

Kendal claims to have only hazy memories of when she was in the original production: “You wipe a play, you shed things as you go along.” Eleanor was first played by Peggy Ashcroft (in her final radio performance) and Margaret Tyzack. The redoubtable sisters are both “bluestockings”, considers Kendal. “They have very much the same beginning politically – they’re edgy, and they break the rules.” Young Eleanor was a communist, involved with a married politician – but the stern older woman, always with “two kinds of cake on the go”, has become, Kendal suggests, “a little more conservative. Mrs Swan is mourning what has gone. Because she’s lived much longer, there’s a sadness for the past.”

The role of Flora passes to Ruby Ashbourne Serkis, who sits beside Kendal and describes the character as “endlessly ballsy. She’s an adventurer.” The play, she thinks, is about “saying yes to life, taking chances when you get them, and not letting cloudy days get in the way”. Flora has “learned to not take notice of what people think of her – it’s what I want for myself”.

Stoppard is caustic about Britain’s imperial past – “It beats me how we’re getting away with it, darling,” scoffs Flora, “I wouldn’t trust some of them to run the Hackney Empire.”

It’s heady material, lightly worn, though the current cast haven’t dug into the background. “It’s all in the play,” Kendal exclaims. “He [Stoppard] has done the digging, don’t mess yourself up with any more.” Even though the play chimes with her own childhood, she brushes aside any personal resonance. “Don’t do all that therapy about it because you’ll fuck up the text,” she declares. “You don’t need it.”

Indian Ink bounces off the page – but is it easy to play? “At first glance, it is effortless but it’s actually super complex,” says Ashbourne Serkis. “A lot of our rehearsal process has been digging to lay those foundations, and then bringing it back to what is there on the surface. It’s such a gift.” For Kendal, the first voice of so many Stoppard roles, you need to “find the style and rhythm. It doesn’t come just by reading it, you’ve got to work out what that music is. Once you get it, you know you’ve got it.”

 

To read the full interview visit The Guardian below

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Indian Ink plays the Main Stage until 31 January.

BOOK INDIAN INK HERE