FEELING BLUE
Diana Vreeland said that fuchsia was the navy blue of India, but Tom Stoppard thinks differently. The current New York production of his decade-old play Indian Ink is blue. The small off-Broadway stage where it is performed, that’s tucked three stories below street level, has a high backdrop that sets the scene in both 1930’s India and 1980’s London. And it is painted blue, a cool, clear, synthetic blue that evokes, more than the subcontinent or England, the sky of a children’s story book.
Throughout the production color is used symbolically rather than descriptively. When the heroine, an English poetess, arrives in India, she wears white, and then, as she takes to the climate and culture (and natives), she wears buttercup yellow, pink-and-green paisley, and screaming red. The hero, a Indian painter, wears white throughout, and behaves with more propriety and restraint than the English men and women around him. Fuchsia does appear, briefly, on a local maharajah’s brilliant jewelled waistcoat. The color stands, very obviously, for India, but for an India (dynastic, fedudal, opulent) that is about to be lost.
Like other Stoppard plays, the drama moves swiftly and seductively between different times. But the production seems curiously placeless, and evokes neither India or in England strongly. Instead it seems to unfold in a fictional space that could be either, or anywhere, really. In that case, why use a backdrop at all?