This is about a woman famous both for her creative freshness and for her unorthodox politics. On the stage, nobody knew better how to transmute her deepest feelings spontaneously into art; off it, few people proved more exasperating to the conventional. Some of her performances were actually cancelled because of her romantic belief in revolutionary communism. "You're very foolish", a friend typically wails. "You wave that silly red flag in everyone's face, and talk all the time about things you don't understand."
The subject of Martin Sherman's play is Isadora Duncan, but there were moments last night when it seemed also to be someone nearer home. After all, who was up there but our own Vanessa Redgrave, wearing a bizarre bolshevik caftan, with hammer and sickle embossed on its red, and rapturously humming the Internationale. Many a play tells us something about its author's life. Not since John Barrymore played an ageing Shakespearean ham in "My Dear Children" can a leading role have so nearly mirrored a great performer.
Redgrave is 25 years older than when she played Isadora in a movie for Karel Reisz; but that is to the good, for this is the ageing if resilient Duncan of 1923, subsisting on champagne and biscuits in the gypsy squalor of a Paris tenement with her reckless Russian husband, the poet Esenin. In so far as there is a plot, it involves her attempt to get money for her Moscow dancing school from an Italian "vice-consul" who is, alas, only a filing clerk. But mainly the play is an amused and often amusing celebration of bohemian life and, when Sherman puts on his thinking cap, a meditation on the mysteries of communication.
Oleg Menshikov, the lithe and skilful Russian actor playing the exhibitionist brat Esenin, speaks his own tongue throughout. French, Greek, Italian and Swedish are also heard, mostly without being understood. What Sherman suggests is that Isadora's dancing was an esperanto of the heart, a soul-language in the confusions of our modern Babel. Every now and then witnesses pay private tribute to her art in words that can verge on the embarrassing: "I thought I saw the face of my mother as she lay dying". But that hardly matters, given Sherman's reservations about the emotional accuracy of words.
What matters more is that his ruminations on language can seem self-consciously imposed on a play that is most enjoyable when Robert Ackerman's production simply lets rip. There is a delicious moment when Frances de la Tour, a nervous, hunted interpreter in a pudding-basin hat, does her po-faced best to avoid translating Menshikov's infantile insults. There is another when he upstages Isadora, and reduces her guests to bewildered horror, by trying to hang himself off the chandelier. The characters, if sometimes sentimentalised for their foreign oddities, are good company; and well acted too. Then there is Redgrave, unpretentiously deepening what might otherwise consist only of ideas and fun. She does not dance, but she moves with erect grace, and she radiates that unforced warmth of which she is uniquely capable. There is much about her Isadora that is impetuous, erratic, self-absorbed, even emotionally sloppy. She can ask the numbly despairing de la Tour: "Did you have children," and not wait for an answer. Yet there is sweetness here too, and genuine pain when she recalls her own dead children, and a rueful, guileless love for the brutal Peter Pan to whom she is wed, and an unsolemn seriousness about her art. This is Isadora, and quintessential Vanessa. Who could ask for more?

Submitted by Jane Grey