‘A master of complications’: Felicity Kendal returns to Tom Stoppard’s Indian Ink after three decades

The writer’s former partner and her co-star Ruby Ashbourne Serkis describe the bittersweet nature of remounting his 90s play so soon after his death

• ‘We were swimming in the mind pool of Tom Stoppard!’ – actors salute the great playwright

I won’t, I promise, refer to Felicity Kendal as Tom Stoppard’s muse. “No,” she says firmly. “Not this week.” Speaking to Stoppard’s former partner and longtime leading lady is delicate in the immediate aftermath of the writer’s death. But she is previewing a revival of his Indian Ink, so he shimmers through the conversation. The way Kendal refers to Stoppard in the present tense tells its own poignant story.

Settling into a squishy brown sofa at Hampstead theatre, Kendal describes revisiting the 1995 work, developed from a 1991 radio play. “It’s a play that I always thought I’d like to go back to.” Previously starring as Flora Crewe, a provocative British poet visiting 1930s India, she now plays Eleanor Swan, Flora’s sister. We meet Eleanor in the 1980s, fending off an intrusive biographer but uncovering her sister’s rapt and nuanced relationships in India.