Indian Ink

by Tom Stoppard

seen at the Hampstead Theatre on 30 January 2026

Jonathan Kent directs Felicity Kendal as Mrs Swan, Ruby Ashbourne Serkis as Flora Crewe,  Gavi Singh Chera as Nirad Das and Donald Sage Mackay as Eldon Pike in a revival of Tom Stoppard's play Indian Ink. Interestingly, when the play was first performed in 1995, Felicity Kendal played Flora Crewe; and poignantly this revival (continuing the Hampstead Theatre's custom of reviving Stoppard's plays) occurred at the time of Stoppard's death.

The play features a typical Stoppardian flair for interrogating human foibles by intertwining time frames and contrasting stories. In the 1930s Flora Crewe is travelling to India partly on account of her health and partly out of curiosity; she meets Nirad Das, a painter, and the two engage in a wary friendship characterised by many misunderstandings about culture and propriety. The action proceeds through direct dialogue combined with extensive quotations from letters Flora has written to her younger sister back in England. In the 1980s Mrs Swan is fielding enquiries from Eldon Pike, a would-be biographer of Flora, who was her elder sister; she has Flora's letters of course, and a considerable amount of knowledge which Pike wants access to, but she is cagey. She also meets Das's son who is able to clarify some details in Flora's life which have hitherto been somewhat mysterious.

The two timescales come and go on the stage counterpointing one another and occasionally producing some inspired comic effects, such as when Pike interrupts the flow of 1930s action with pompous "footnotes" explaining references - or when, by contrast, he is utterly baffled. In some ways the Indian scenes seem to be evoked or imagined by Mrs Swan - except that it is clear that she could not know all the details presented to us.

The set, designed by Leslie Travers, allows scenes from the two times to flow into one another without causing any confusion, just as Stoppard intended. The result is that we see things happening in the 1930s, and we see people in the 1980s trying to discover these things or recall them from memory, and the discrepancy between the lived life and the biographical enterprise is delicately presented: a wonderful achievement.

Hay Fever

by Noel Coward

seen at the Duke of York's Theatre on 13 May 2015

This revival of a famous farce from 1925 is not entirely successful; its main claim to attention is Felicity Kendal, who plays the matriarch Judith Bliss. Judith's super-dramatic style as a recently not-so-retired theatre doyenne controls the behaviour of her husband and two children and leads to the general mayhem that farce feeds on. Kendal's performance is flawlessly timed and full of the necessary mannerisms and abrupt changes of register, but the remaining cast are not so adept at the form, and there is too much shouting and too little subtlety.

The play itself shows its age, and some of its comic references are now irretrievably dated and consequently no longer funny. The first act in particular lacked energy, though the ludicrous goings-on in the second act raised the level considerably.

I wonder if perhaps the streak of narcissistic cruelty that features in several of Coward's plays as leavening for the comedy (for example 'Design for Living' and 'Private Lives') is weaker here, or if it was just not allowed sufficient head in this production.