Are Dead, a play that won him New York's Tony Award for best play of the season. Ever since, Stoppard has been a fecund source of witty, intelligent, literary scripts for the stage and screen, never more widely acclaimed than with his current screenplay for Shakespeare in Love . It is a lovely play with some structural and thematic parallels to Stoppard's 1993 Arcadia, but lighter, less dense, and more accessible. Our heroine is a poet, Flora Crewe, a liberated and independent woman who, in 1930, travels to India for her health. As Arcadia crisscrossed time periods from the early nineteenth century to the present, Indian Ink takes us back and forth between Flora's adventures in 1930 India and the 1980's, when a biographer is researching her life with a good deal of assistance from Flora's surviving older sister.
Academics take their share of gentle mockery, but no one is immune.
Stoppard's seemingly encyclopedic collection of information is awe inspiring here, as always. Part of the pleasure of seeing his plays is to be exposed to cultural and historical materials one has not previously explored. His command of the language seems total, never an end to amusing wit and wordplay underlining his thematic exposition. The risk of such a play is that without acting and direction of the very highest caliber, the yeasty mix can flatten quickly. The sparkly dialogue must float out, an appropriate pace established and maintained.