Indian Ink
Jun. 26th, 2007 02:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
magidSunday I went to a matinee performance of Indian Ink (Stoppard) at the BCA, in the space next door to the black box, the one with a thrust stage. Unfortunately, I'd gotten tickets late enough that we were off to one side, so there were a lot of times I got to see a face and a back rather than two faces, but I enjoyed it nevertheless.
The play is about an English poet on one stop of a lecture tour around India in 1930. Flora Crewe (Did Stoppard use that surname to have echoes of A Little Princess? Probably not, but I kept thinking of it.) arrives and is treated as a celebrity. There are many admirers, including a painter who offers to do a portrait of her, the local maharajah, and an English captain assisting the local Resident. Interspersed with the scenes of this story are scenes 50 years later as her sister and her biographer try to figure out the missing pieces of Flora's story. (Having the two eras happening at the same time reminded me of Arcadia, of course, though in that play it's much tighter, since they're using the same rooms as well.)
That doesn't capture it at all, of course. Especially with Stoppard, it's the dialogue that makes the magic, and that happens here, too, with quick, witty repartee and word play (sentences maximizing Indian English words, for instance) as well as discussions of the nature of art (especially rasa, the flavor of art, a viewer's response to art, as well as staying true to one's own art) and politics of the Raj (this happens at the same time as Ghandi's Salt March, while the sister, who had been a colonial too, had rather politically incorrect ways of looking at things even in the 1980s).
The set was a bit asymmetric, a papier mache baobab tree dominating one side, the rest of the space feeling like a cross between a wood-floored veranda and the inside of the little dak house the protagonist stayed in while she was visiting the town, including wicker furniture, a fan, and mosquito netting over the bed. Luckily for me, I'd chosen the side that things seemed to be slanted towards.
Many of the actors are Indian; I wondered how many of them actually have the sort of sing-song cadence of Indian English and how many put that on for the play. There were lines in some Indian language (Hindi? no clue) occasionally, and I wonder whether Stoppard wrote them in English, or transliterated them, or what.
It's not a short play (2:30 run time). The first half was excellent, the timing, the acting, everything falling into place. The second half felt less tight. One of the moments that felt like it should have been an "aha!" didn't have enough oomph. And the ending was mostly, but not completely, satisfying. I haven't figured out what I'd change, but some kind of tweaking could happen to make it stronger. Still, the journey there was lovely, and I'm very glad I went.
The play is about an English poet on one stop of a lecture tour around India in 1930. Flora Crewe (Did Stoppard use that surname to have echoes of A Little Princess? Probably not, but I kept thinking of it.) arrives and is treated as a celebrity. There are many admirers, including a painter who offers to do a portrait of her, the local maharajah, and an English captain assisting the local Resident. Interspersed with the scenes of this story are scenes 50 years later as her sister and her biographer try to figure out the missing pieces of Flora's story. (Having the two eras happening at the same time reminded me of Arcadia, of course, though in that play it's much tighter, since they're using the same rooms as well.)
That doesn't capture it at all, of course. Especially with Stoppard, it's the dialogue that makes the magic, and that happens here, too, with quick, witty repartee and word play (sentences maximizing Indian English words, for instance) as well as discussions of the nature of art (especially rasa, the flavor of art, a viewer's response to art, as well as staying true to one's own art) and politics of the Raj (this happens at the same time as Ghandi's Salt March, while the sister, who had been a colonial too, had rather politically incorrect ways of looking at things even in the 1980s).
The set was a bit asymmetric, a papier mache baobab tree dominating one side, the rest of the space feeling like a cross between a wood-floored veranda and the inside of the little dak house the protagonist stayed in while she was visiting the town, including wicker furniture, a fan, and mosquito netting over the bed. Luckily for me, I'd chosen the side that things seemed to be slanted towards.
Many of the actors are Indian; I wondered how many of them actually have the sort of sing-song cadence of Indian English and how many put that on for the play. There were lines in some Indian language (Hindi? no clue) occasionally, and I wonder whether Stoppard wrote them in English, or transliterated them, or what.
It's not a short play (2:30 run time). The first half was excellent, the timing, the acting, everything falling into place. The second half felt less tight. One of the moments that felt like it should have been an "aha!" didn't have enough oomph. And the ending was mostly, but not completely, satisfying. I haven't figured out what I'd change, but some kind of tweaking could happen to make it stronger. Still, the journey there was lovely, and I'm very glad I went.