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Wednesday, August 14, 2002

By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Critic

Simply let yourself go to be swirled up in Tom Stoppard's "Indian Ink," a layered comedy about an English poet's artistic-erotic visit to India in 1930 and the attempt of others to come to terms with its legacy 55 years later. It's about literature and painting, race and empire, myth and politics -- but mainly it's about love, loss and memory.

	"Indian Ink" WHERE: Quantum Theatre at Allegheny Cemetery, enter at 4734 Butler St., Lawrenceville. WHEN: 8 p.m. Wed.-Sun. through Aug. 25. TICKETS: $15-$18; 412-394-3353.

That's a pretty full plate, but it doesn't feel it. There's little of the showy intellectual high jinks that scare some people off Stoppard. "Indian Ink" is a love story. Enjoying it just takes a mind willing to track simultaneous stories and a tolerance of implication and indeterminacy. You should emerge feeling flattered and sensitized by its compassionate delicacy and good humor -- and transported by Robin Walsh's charismatic portrayal of Flora Crewe, an English poet for whom India is revelation and finale.

You can't separate Stoppard's witty text from the artfully environmental staging by Quantum Theatre on a tomb-dusted hillside in Allegheny Cemetery. The site helps us note ironic parallels -- but not at the cost of making "Indian Ink" a primarily intellectual experience. The sensual comes first.

We sit facing gravestones, at our backs a curving wall that helps focus sound. The hillside is un-groomed, with downed branches from the June microburst. When Flora first arrives in Jummapur, she comes over the brow of the hill, catching the late sun. A dozen torches help define the distance as darkness settles. Trees tower above, spangled with white lights. The cemetery suggests the recovery of memory at the play's heart. Like India, it's exotic, both taking antiquity for granted.

Flora's 1930 visit parallels two visits to her surviving younger sister, Eleanor, in England, 55 years later. One visitor is the American academic who is annotating Flora's letters. The other is the Anglicized painter son of the Indian who painted Flora's portrait, both as English poet and as Indian erotic image.

Flora has come to lecture and escape her tuberculosis. She loves India, though she's bemused by the Anglophilia of her host and the handsome painter, Das. She is also attracted to an English officer and spars suggestively with the local rajah, possessor of erotic art and fabulous automobiles. And she works on her poetry -- erotic, as well.

Connecting the two times are Flora's letters. As she composes them, we see them read and puzzled over 55 years later. Eventually, in a theatrical coup, we meet the young Eleanor and a young man who fits right into the story. As Eleanor in 1931 and the academic in 1985 finally visit the same Indian cemetery, everything dovetails.

The play has been deftly trimmed, removing four small roles plus assorted servants. Walsh is luminous and deliciously eccentric, with a voice that moves easily among insolence, joy, wonder and lust. Director Rodger Henderson supports her well, starting with Susan McGregor-Laine's Eleanor, who balances tart humor and a warm heart. John Imro is a strong presence as the unsympathetic British officer and Cody Henderson's academic is funny without caricature.

But "Indian Ink" is inconceivable without three strong Indian actors. Sanjit De Silva shades emotion with irony as the soulful Das, while Rajesh Bose captures the edgier irony of his son and Sunil Malhotra provides varied high comedy in four roles.

Occasionally the spoken dialogue is faint, but sound effects and musical punctuation are helpful, and the lighting is evocative. Act 2 rambles a bit, but it's weaker only in relation to Act 1, which is just about perfect.

Not all questions are answered. As Eleanor shrewdly notes, "biography is the worst possible excuse for getting people wrong." Still, even as we see the comedy of the misunderstanding academic, we feel we get it right -- we understand Flora's uncompromising hunger, we see young Das discover his inscrutable father.

Or does he? Think of the mystery of our parents in their young adulthood, so completely unlike what we know later. Think of the mystery of India, overwhelming the small-minded English. Raj, academic, children, audiences -- do we always get it wrong? Other people and love are perhaps both as foreign as India, as mysterious as a cemetery.

Christopher Rawson can be reached at crawson@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1666.