Kendal is formidable in a fitting first epitaph to Stoppard

A fortnight after West End playhouses dimmed their lights in tribute to Sir Tom Stoppard, Hampstead theatre's stage lights rise on a revival of his 1995 play Indian Ink, originally intended to mark 30 years since the play's premiere.

- Mark Lawson

The first production after a playwright's death is always poignant but, in this case, startlingly so: Indian Ink concerns literary posterity. About Flora Crewe, an Edwardian poet who travelled to India, critics get most things wrong, a crassness represented by Eldon Pike, an American academic, editing Crewe's correspondence and planning a biography that Stoppard makes clear will be disastrously false and gossipy. (He was much luckier with Hermione Lee.) In mid-1980s scenes, Pike pesters Flora's surviving sister, Eleanor Swan, for the letters and poems we see her writing 50 years earlier, while she is painted by a young artist, Nirad Das. Indian Ink grew from a radio play, its title In the Native State a very Stoppardian pun encompassing both the painting of nudes and the regions of British India permitted some self-government - both pivotal to the story.