SD: About a year ago, I was having lunch at Oodles of Noodles with Serge  Seiden, assistant to Joy Zinoman, Artistic Director of the Studio  Theater here in Washington.  Our conversation roamed but I distinctly  remember asking Serge if he'd seen the movie Shakespeare In Love which  led to talk of Tom Stoppard.  Never one to shy away from sharing my  opinions, I told Serge that I thought the time was ripe for a production  of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.  Serge looked down at his noodles.  I  thought I'd lost him until he said that Studio had done it (which I had  forgotten!) and that he didn't think Joy would want to do it again.  Then what about Indian Ink, said I.  Don't know it, said Serge. 

SD: I had seen Indian Ink in London earlier that year and had loved it.  Art  Malik, star of the television series Jewel In The Crown played the male  lead, Nirad Das; Felicity Kendall, the female lead, Flora Crewe. Set in India during the Raj and in England some 50 years later, its  themes are cultural juxtapositions and the unknowability of history. Typical Stoppard fare, but told this time with unmatched sensuality in  language that is rich and rewarding.  Some good jokes too, as befits the  playwright who refers to himself as a bounced Czech. 

SD: Reports would filter through from time to time and by the spring, the  announcement was made that Studio's 1999-2000 season would open with  Indian Ink.  I was thrilled. Then there was press coverage, "ink", of a  nationwide search for a suitable cast (a challenge the production met  almost perfectly). 

SD: Indian Ink opened last Sunday.  My husband and I were in the audience,  not without  trepidation.  I knew the play and loved it but what about  the production?  Would it measure up to London's all-star cast?  Would  Ink flow as well on this side of the Atlantic as it does in Stoppard's  adopted home?  Would the cast turn it into a travesty -- bad pukka  accents and all that? 

Within minutes of the three-hour performance, I began to relax.  Isabel  Keating's Flora had a youthful vivacity and flirtatiousness that  Felicity Kendall's lacked.  Faran Tahir as Nirad Das, the male lead,  gives a performance as sensuous and sensitive as any I have seen on  stage, and June Hansen as Eleanor Swan, Flora's sister, gives the  performance -- eccentricity and intelligence in equal parts -- of her  distinguished career.  Hugh Nees, as the academic whose life's work is a  biography of Flora Crewe and the butt of Stoppard's joke on those who  believe that the past can be explained through footnotes, has the advantage over his English counterpart of being able to deliver an accent,  Texas rube, that is code for language snobs on this side of the pond. 

SD: Excuse me, what's un-British about being sensual?