Sitting for a Portrait as Complex as the Raj Tom Stoppard’s ‘Indian Ink’ Focuses on English Sisters
Ben BrantleySeptember 30, 2014: If you’re a fan of the fabled Mitford sisters — the last of whom, Deborah, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, died last week — you’ll doubtless be eager to meet the Crewe girls, Flora and Eleanor. In the late 1920s and early ’30s, Flora, the elder and flashier of the two, and Eleanor occupied much the same social landscape as the Mitfords — a tea-and-cocktail-drenched world of artists and aristocrats, politicians and pundits. And as with the Mitfords, tales of their lives are guaranteed catnip for a certain breed of Anglophile cultural voyeur. That breed is likely to overlap with fans of Tom Stoppard, the creator of the (fictional) sisters Crewe, who are the leading characters of his Indian Ink, an enticing if overpacked play from 1995 that opened on Tuesday night at the Laura Pels Theater in its belated New York premiere. And no one should be disappointed by the news that Flora and Eleanor have been brought to life for the occasion by the equally exquisite Romola Garai, in her Off Broadway debut, and Rosemary Harris.
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