Nobody likes a showoff. But if the showoff is Tom Stoppard, whose erudite, formally clever plays have been acclaimed for decades, there’s an exception. You don’t need to hit the books before one of his plays, but it doesn’t hurt, either.
Like earlier works such as the Tony-winning, Russia-set “The Coast of Utopia” and the time-jumping “Arcadia,” Stoppard’s 1995 effort “Indian Ink” is bursting with ideas and themes. It’s also a frustrating emotional blank.
The show straddles two eras and two continents, sometimes in the same scene. Large chunks take place in 1930 India, which Flora Crewe (Romola Garai, formerly of the BBC series “The Hour”) is visiting because the local air is meant to be good for her lungs.
It’s hard to believe Flora’s in bad health: This vibrant, beautiful woman of 35 appears to be full of life. A liberated poet — she’s mingled, sometimes intimately, with the likes of H.G. Wells and Modigliani — she approaches the new locale with gusto.
The show goes back and forth between colonial India and mid-’80s England, where our heroine’s sister, the now-elderly Eleanor Swan (Broadway legend Rosemary Harris), is helping American scholar Eldon Pike (Neal Huff) edit Flora’s collected letters.
Stoppard is at his wily best when Eleanor and Eldon comment on what Flora’s up to — we see what happens, then hear the version in Flora’s correspondence. Sometimes the pair add useful footnotes; sometimes their interpretation is completely off.
Nowhere is the distance between fact and letter wider than with the relationship between Flora and artist Nirad Das (Firdous Bamji), an Anglophile who paints her portrait. How their bond develops is the show’s central mystery — though it’s a huge problem that the characters have zero heat here, even when Flora somehow ends up nude.
This is the biggest flaw in Carey Perloff’s otherwise elegant production. Other problems can be tracked back to the writing.
Garai and Harris’ sterling performances can’t hide the fact that their characters don’t have any inner life. Stoppard just doesn’t seem to care, too busy name-dropping famous artists and sprinkling in tidbits about Indian culture, the Raj and all that.
For that, we, too, can go to the library.