Review Roundup: Roundabout's INDIAN INK Opens Off-Broadway - All the Reviews!

Roundabout Theatre Company presents Tony Award-winner Rosemary Harris in the New York premiere of Tom Stoppard's Indian Ink, directed by Carey Perloff. Indian Ink officially opens tonight, September 30, at the Laura Pels Theatre in the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre (111 46th Street). This is a limited engagement through November 30, 2014.

The cast includes Firdous Bamji ("Nirad Das"),Bill Buell ("Englishman"), Nick Choksi ("Dilip"),Romola Garai ("Flora Crewe"), Rosemary Harris ("Eleanor Swan"), Neal Huff ("Eldon Pike"), Caroline Lagerfelt ("Englishwoman"),Omar Maskati ("Nazrul"), Tim McGeever ("Resident"), Brenda Meaney ("Nell"), Philip Mills ("Eric"), Ajay Naidu ("Coomaraswami") Bhavesh Patel ("Anish Das"), Lee Aaron Rosen ("David Durance") and Rajeev Varma ("Rajah/Politician").

Set on two different continents and in two different eras, Indian Ink follows free-spirited English poet Flora Crewe (Romola Garai) 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 (Rosemary Harris) tries to preserve the legacy of Flora's controversial career.

Let's see what the critics had to say...

Ben Brantley, The New York Times: ...this is a play by Mr. Stoppard, who likes to warp and weave together different eras of history. And like many Stoppard plays, "Indian Ink" is about time, and what is lost and found or never retrieved in its rushing currents. It is also about Anglo-Indian relations, and the distortions of thought and language that exist within that hyphenated concept; colonial subjugation and the cultural Stockholm syndrome it sometimes inspires; art as a public and private means of expression; the elusiveness of home in an international world; the niche literary industry devoted to beautiful female writers who led lives sensational or tragic (or preferably both); and the utter unreliability of recorded history. That's 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. Yet, for once, the field seems too vast and varied to keep even his quicksilver intellect from occasionally flagging.

Jennifer Farrar, Associated Press: There's a timeless sensuality in the air of the Roundabout Theatre Company's leisurely, evocative and thoroughly enjoyable New York premiere...An accomplished cast includes the dual treat of Rosemary Harris and Romola Garai, playing sisters connected across time through letters written by Garai's character 50 years earlier...Fluid direction by Carey Perloff successfully handles Stoppard's intermingling of past and present, while the actors relish the rich dialogue and give unique personalities to their deliberately stereotypical characters.

Terry Teachout, Wall Street Journal: It's a provocative character study, though the past-meets-present double-helix structure feels at times like a rough draft for Mr. Stoppard's "Arcadia." To be sure, "Arcadia" opened two years earlier, but "Indian Ink" is in fact an expanded stage version of a 1991 BBC radio play by Mr. Stoppard called "In the Native State." This may also help to explain the loose-jointedness of "Indian Ink," whose large, radio-friendly canvas--it calls for a cast of 15--is novelistic in scope...That said, Carey Perloff...has done right by a tricky script. Likewise her cast, well led by Mr. Bamji, Ms. Garai and Rosemary Harris, who is superlatively good as an old woman whose ironic complacency conceals intense sorrow.

David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter: ...director Carey Perloff's lucid staging and her accomplished cast make a persuasive case for what turns out to be an evocative, erotically charged piece of writing...Beloved stage veteran Rosemary Harris brings her customary warmth and spry intelligence to the role of Eleanor Swan...In a less gifted writer's hands, this would probably be an exotic potboiler dressed up with snippets of colonial history and edifying dashes of poetry and politics. But Stoppard's construction is so elegant, his language so witty, and Perloff's handling of the intercut narratives so assured that the play remains absorbing, even as it stretches on toward the three-hour mark.

Linda Winer, Newsday: In director Carey Perloff's incandescent production, exquisitely and generously cast with the great Rosemary Harris and British film actress Romola Garai, "Indian Ink" turns out to be vintage Stoppard from his time-traveling era of "Arcadia" and "The Invention of Love." Like "Arcadia," still his masterwork, this more delicate play poses mysteries about lost lives that survivors, no matter how they try, can never really understand.

Elysa Gardner, USA Today: Like a number of Stoppard's previous works, Indian Ink (***½ out of four stars)...considers how personal, political and historical developments intersect and inform each other...Firdous Bamji's gorgeously nuanced performance as Nirad makes the actor a standout even in the flawless cast of this Roundabout Theatre Company production, directed with easy warmth and probing intelligence by Carey Perloff. Bamji's delicate, hesitant movements convey the sensitivity of an artist and a gentleman, but he also projects a simmering virility that reveals Nirad as more than just those things. Romola Garai, similarly, gives Flora a haunted, fragile edge without suppressing the blazing vitality that is her essence. Sharp-witted and romantic, sensual and curious, the character provides an ideal vehicle for Stoppard's piercingly beautiful, expressive language.

Helen Shaw, Time Out NY: Tom Stoppard's Indian Ink (1995) followed immediately on his masterpiece Arcadia, which used the same narrative strategies to better effect, shadowing this lesser work. Even dimmed, though, Stoppard delights...Indeed, the small things are great in Carey Perloff's uneven production. Props impress us, while Neil Patel's set (a gloppy blue wall) looks awful; secondary characters (look for Nick Choksi) out-act both of poor Eleanor's interlocutors. Most seriously, though, the ever-present Garai shouts every sentence. Her flat affect and lack of control land the whole delicate project right in the mulligatawny. She's a muse managing to blur her own portrait.

Jesse Green, Vulture: There's no denying the astonishing craft of the individual scenes, the masterly way Stoppard plays with echoes and reversals, tossing themes this way and that like pizza dough. The dialogue, too, is deeply entertaining -- sexy or funny, and often both, as the case requires. And if everyone talks beautifully regardless of background, it makes some of the lumps of historical background go down more easily. But Stoppard's uncharity toward Pike is a tip-off to the play's underlying problems. Eventually everyone must get hammered into place in the abstract superstructure, which causes a problem of diminishing returns. By the middle of the second act, the characters are far more interested in creating or solving the mystery of the portraits than the audience can reasonably be.

Elisabeth Vincentelli, New York Post: Nobody likes a showoff. But if the showoff is Tom Stoppard, whose erudite, formally clever plays have been acclaimed for decades, there's an exception. You don't need to hit the books before one of his shows, but it doesn't hurt, either...Stoppard's 1995 effort "Indian Ink" is bursting with ideas and themes. It's also a frustrating emotional blank...Garai and Harris' sterling performances can't hide the fact that their characters don't have any inner life. Stoppard just doesn't seem to care, too busy name-dropping famous artists and sprinkling in tidbits about Indian culture, the Raj and all that. For that, we, too, can go to the library.

Steven Suskin, The Huffington Post: Indian Ink works perfectly well for New York audiences even if it is not quite so accessible as Stoppard's masterworks. The production is lovely and pretty much a treat, and perfect fare as a subscription offering for a major nonprofit. But it is not compelling, exactly; while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties, Arcadia and The Coast of Utopiagive us much to discuss and ponder, Indian Ink--at least as presented here--is welcome but not indispensable theatergoing. What is indispensable is Rosemary Harris...To say that the eighty-seven-year-old Ms. Harris is incandescent is overtly clichéd, except it's true. We shouldn't be surprised every time Ms. Harris--or Maggie or Judi, for that matter--comes along with one of these brilliant portrayals; we should just go out of our way to watch them and add to our personal theatrical memory bank.

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Photo Credit: Joan Marcus