by Tom Stoppard

Directed by Fiona Kennedy

Play 2,   2006

The Play

More than fifty years after the British have left the subcontinent, the British Raj continues to be a source of fascination today. Set against this shift in history, "Indian Ink" is based on Tom Stoppard's 1991 radio play "In the Native State". It premiered in London in 1995.

"Indian Ink" is set in 1930's India, where an English poet, Flora Crewe, befriends a widowed painter, Nirad Das. The worlds of these two artists collide as their respective nations break apart. Fifty years later, biographer Eldon Pike struggles to piece together Flora's free-spirited life from the fragmented bits of evidence she left behind.

The result is a multi-layered comedy of two sophisticated cultures.

The Writer

Tom Stoppard was born "Tom Straussler" in Zlin, Czechoslovakia in 1937. His family moved to Singapore to escape the Nazis, then, shortly before the Japanese invasion of Singapore, young Tom fled to Darjeeling, India with his mother and brother. His father, however, remained behind and was killed during the invasion. In 1946, the family emigrated to England after Tom's mother married Kenneth Stoppard, a major in the British army.

Tom Stoppard has won Broadway's Tony Award three times as author of a Best Play. In 1968 for "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead", in 1976 for "Travesties" and in 1984 for "The Real Thing." He was also nominated in 1995 for "Arcadia" and in 2001 for "The Invention of Love".

With a reputation as a writer of "serious comedy", Stoppard's plays are plays of ideas that deal with issues, yet he presents these ideas with verbal wit and visual humour, that keep it entertaining. His use of language, with its puns, jokes, innuendo, and other wordplay, is a chief characteristic of his work.

Quote:    "The days of the digital watch are numbered."

The Director

At Villanova Players, Fiona Kennedy most recently directed "The Shifting heart".