Review: ‘Indian Ink’ at ACT is Tom Stoppard mostly at his best

The brain often comes first in the heady canon of Tom Stoppard.

From the iconic “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” (1967) to the epic “The Coast of Utopia” (2002), the British playwright has always dazzled with his wit and mental agility, his gift for twirling characters and themes across the expanse of time and space. “Indian Ink” is no exception, an epic grappling with colonialism, race and history, but it’s also unexpectedly moving.

Carey Perloff’s delicate revival of the play, which runs through Feb. 8 at American Conservatory Theater on the heels of a successful New York run, glories in Stoppard’s longing for big theories and endless mysteries. If the intense erudition of the time-traveling play wears a bit thin after nearly three hours, what’s surprising is how keenly the play stimulates the heart as well as the intellect.

Although it never achieves the grand passion of his masterpiece “Arcadia,” “Ink” also spins around yearnings that are never sated, academics in search of themes and the elusive nature of history and love.

When clueless professor Eldon Pike (Anthony Fusco) tracks down the stern Eleanor Swan (Roberta Maxwell) for leads on the life and work of her free-spirited sister, Flora Crewe (a lovely turn by Brenda Meaney) who had traveled to India as a poet in the 1930s, she is suspicious.

“Biography,” she says with characteristic reproach, “is the worst possible excuse for getting people wrong.”

From there the play skips back and forth between Eleanor’s warm memories and Flora’s hot romance with the sensitive Indian painter Nirad Das (the charismatic Firdous Bamji), gathering electricity during the seduction of the past and then squandering it amid the triviality of the present.

Only in India does Flora, a bon vivant on the London literary scene who pals around with the likes of H.G. Wells and Amedeo Modigliani, discover that men may have depth after all. Before she met Das, with his twin devotions to art and Indian independence, she assumed men were disposable. As her sister puts it: “She used them like batteries. When things went flat, she’d put in a new one.”

Perloff’s intimacy with this piece in particular (she directed the U.S. premiere in 1999) and with the Stoppardian oeuvre in general adds to the fluidity and crispness of the production.

Neil Patel’s sets are beautiful and a touch surreal and Robert Wierzel’s lighting perfectly evokes the lush melancholy of the memory play.

Still Stoppard undermines the most provocative scenes in the play — the explosive exchanges played with warmth and wit by Meaney and Bamji — by trotting back to the tedious present with its footnotes and regrets. Bamji, who also starred in the 1999 staging, and Meaney (“Venus in Fur”) generate so much chemistry that the long-ago scenes crackle with intensity.

For the record, Flora also tangles with an upstanding Englishman (Philip Mills) and a decadent Rajah (Rajeev Varma) as she explores the terrain of Jamapur.

By contrast, there is little of interest revealed in the present. Mocking academia only goes so far. Maxwell also seems stiff in the part of Eleanor, which throws off the play’s rhythms.

Certainly, Stoppard has revised the play, making the romance deeper and the play’s ending far more emotionally resonant. The bond between the sisters also seems more potent than before. But the past remains the far sexier place to be in this universe.

Only in the past does the playwright reveal the blood and guts of his characters, the fearless poet and the would-be revolutionary. Their volatile relationship gives “Indian Ink” its most indelible moments.

Contact Karen D’Souza at 408-271-3772. Read her at www.mercurynews.com/karen-dsouza, and follow her at Twitter.com/karendsouza4.