That alone would create an emotional charge in Hampstead Theatre’s auditorium.
But add in Kendal’s intensely moving performance – and themes of grief, love, and how a dead writer is remembered, and the resonances in Jonathan Kent’s sensitive revival are quietly devastating.
Kendal is Eleanor Swan, an acerbic, wry widow who sweetly weaponises tea and cake in her English garden as she fends off the curiosity of her late sister’s would-be biographer Eldon Pike. (Donald Sage Mackay.)
In a dual timeline, we switch between the late 1980s, and 60 years earlier with Flora Crewe’s arrival in India.
It’s the part Kendal played in the original radio play, later adapted for the stage, and Ruby Ashbourne-Serkis is the ebullient, unapologetically unconventional poet with a string of scandalous affairs under her belt and a terminal illness.
Ashbourne Serkis is utterly charming as Flora, bulldozing social mores with a beatific smile ready wit, and cut glass accent.
Since this is Stoppard there is heart and head – so there’s also exploration of the collusion of Indian rulers in the British Raj, the rise of Gandhi, and India’s post colonial legacy.
But as a Czech-born Englishman who spent his childhood in India, Stoppard is also concerned with cultural colonialism and its effect on artists.
Here Dickens-loving painter Nirad Das (Gavi Singh Chera) falls for Flora as she sits for his portrait – as she urges him to express himself in Indian not Western style we later learn that her fearlessness changes his life.
In a Stoppardian in-joke, Pike pops up around the auditorium interjecting interminable footnotes and sniffing around for the nude portrait and intimate letters that Mrs Swan is withholding.
She is one of two characters who believe the British brought order to India’s chaos yet express love of their adopted ‘home.’
Her love for the older sister who raised her bursts forth in frustration that she didn’t live to see the recognition she deserved, yet none of those who pick over her reputation care a fig about her.
Leslie Travers’ set captures the duality of gorgeous English and tropical blooms against an intensely blue sky and as the petals fall, Swan approaches the grave of the dead poet to grieve.
In terms of wit and complexity, this may not be one of Stoppard’s top drawer plays, but Kendal’s command and connection with the material is terribly poignant.
Indian Ink runs at Hampstead Theatre until January 31.
