ACTRESS Cate Hamer plays a very unusual woman called Flora Crewe on the main house stage at Salisbury Playhouse tonight.

Unusual because the central character in Tom Stoppard's play, Indian Ink, travels to India alone in 1930, still at the height of British Empire's dominance, but also at a time of dawning nationalism in the subcontinent.

"Flora is very independent," says Cate. "A free thinking poet and not quite a part of the British set as she is unconventional."

Flora meets Nirad Das, an Indian painter who paints her portrait, and one of the central themes of Indian Ink says Cate is the "burgeoning relationship between the two people from different cultures".

The action of the play weaves between India in 1930 and London in 1980, where Flora's elderly sister Eleanor is visited by a Texan professor, Eldon Pike who is carrying out research for a book on Flora, and Nirad's son who is trying to piece together his father's life.

Cate is enjoying playing a poet: "It is fantastic playing someone who is very much her own person, a poet who has come across such writers as H G Wells and Virginia Woolf, members of the Bloomsbury set."

Being Tom Stoppard, Indian Ink is a bit of a puzzle, and, says Cate, "there are a variety of themes and issues. The playwright wants you to go on seeing and discovering all the way through, as things are not always what they seem."

Lucy Pitman-Wallace, who most recently directed Oscar Wilde's, A Woman of No Importance, at Salisbury Playhouse, directs the production, and Chook Sibtain plays Nirad Das.

Rashid Karapiet will be reprising the role he played in the original West End production as Mr Coomaraswami.

Indian Ink was based on Tom Stoppard's own radio play In the Native State, written in 1991, and the Salisbury Playhouse production runs until May 5.