Indian Ink ny Tom Soppard (pictured) is furiously intelligent. It's a play that could easily work as a 900-page novel. There is so much life, discussion and history crammed into its two-and-a-half-hour running time, one fears for oneself and the audience.

It focuses on British poet Flora Crewe (Anne Popplewell), who visits India in 1930 for both her curiosity and "her health". She soon develops a close friendship with the shy painter Nirad Das (Saatvic) who she lets paint her portrait. This story is intercut with scenes of - more than 50 years later - Crewe's elderly sister (Hannah Ilett) speaking to Nirad's son (Viral Thakerar), and an American professor, Eldon Pike (Omar El-Okdah), who is editing a volume of Flora's collected letters, about what happened that year.

Both the production's major strength and its major weakness are to do with its presentation of the text. It is hard to breathe life into Stoppard's dialogue, with its almost pompous verbiage and occasionally jarring post-modern riffing. Also, as some of the shaky acting bears testament to, it is hard to deliver. The production's strength is that it leaves the dialogue unadorned and unconstrained, confronting the audience with its themes. This, paradoxically, is also the production's greatest weakness. The director - owing to the fact it is played too straight - gives the audience no emotional or thematic anchors.

It makes the experience akin to a Shakespeare play in the sense one feels the need to be familiar with the text before walking in, so as to fully engage with the material. A lack of a clear interpretation makes this play all talk and no conflict, all dense post-colonial essay and, simply, not theatre. In a play with a cacophony of different voices with so much to say about the strengths and weaknesses of empire, this is a problem.

That said, the piece still has impact. It is an outsider's view of the British Empire, with all its weaknesses, and somewhat unfashionably, all its strengths, brought out into the harsh spotlight of socio-political drama. Despite the earnest staging and occasionally patchy performances, it's worth catching.