A great actor's task is not just to seduce the audience; it is to possess and inhabit a role to the point where impersonation merges with the actor's personality.
Two different, but equally compelling, performances on the London stage strike to the heart of the mystery, with the added frisson of historical reference: Vanessa Redgrave as Isadora Duncan in "When She Danced" by Martin Sherman at the Globe; Antony Sher as Brecht's cartoon version of Adolf Hitler in "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui" in the Olivier auditorium at the Royal National Theatre.
Redgrave's Isadora is an act of immersion in the legend of someone whose artistry may be held responsible for the worst excesses of modern dance. She encouraged people to think they could perform without technique; but when she danced, she changed people's lives. Redgrave inhabits a poetic state of being which corresponds, no doubt, to the trance-like condition of Duncan emoting savagely to Tchaikovsky's Pathetique and Beethoven's Seventh.
Nabokov thought Isadora resembled 'a Roman matron after revels'. Indeed, Sheila Gish approximated to that description in a fine performance in this same play at the King's Head three years ago. But Redgrave moves on a different plane, in a different sphere, one of mystery and communion, of private rapture made dangerously public at one of Isadora's lowest ebbs in Paris in 1923.
In Bob Crowley's superb design of a single golden column, tall blue shutters, blue silk curtains and a chandelier, Isadora's hotel environment on the Rue de la Pompe is both tawdry and magnificent. She has no idea where the next bottle of champagne is coming from. And she is deeply in lust with Sergei Esenin, the poet she met and married on her Moscow trip of the previous year.
Esenin, played with a winning athleticism, by Oleg Menshikov, speaks no English, is 18 years her junior, and a destructive alcoholic. A crisis is caused by his recital (in Russian) of his poem about drowned puppies, 'Song of a Dog'. This triggers memories of the tragedy in 1913 when Isadora's two children by Gordon Craig were drowned with their nurse in a car accident.
Sherman's text provides a discussion map of the artistic temperament: Redgrave ("I never rehearse my feet') strands magically still and suffused with feeling as an adoring young pianist plays a Chopin etude.
Otherwise, her movement is as free and as graceful as Duncan's must have been; and she glistens, fine shoulders exposed, in a white toga-towel robe. Elemental is the word, as it was in her recent staggering act of poetic self-immolation in Simon Callow's fine film of "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe".
Robert Allan Ackerman's production competently orchestrates the babel of the stage around Redgrave. Various set speeches serve as testimonies: the young pianist whose mother gave birth dreaming of Isadora, the translator who saw her in St Petersburg and has never cried since. Alison Fiske is a brisk American assistant, while Frances de la Tour duels equally with Redgrave as the forlorn, physically hamstrung linguistic cypher Miss Belzer.
Kevin Elyot, as an Italian filing clerk mistakenly assumed to be a consular official, is the sole survivor of the King's Head production and a very funny butt of a sponsorship dinner at which a dreadful infant prodigy (Jodie Scott) apes the Duncan style and is applauded by the politician as a worthy exponent. There is a notable West End debut by Michael Sheen as the eager pianist, though the sound effect to which he mines at the keyboard is diabolical.
Shaw said of Sarah Bernhardt in Sudermann's "Heimat" that she did not enter the character, she substituted herself for it; Eleonore Duse, he said, was better in the same role because, with her, 'every part is a separate creation'. There is a distinction to be made, perhaps, great performance and great acting. Peter Hall thought so, in discussing Olivier and Ralph Richardson. It is the same with Sher and Redgrave: the first performs, the second reveals her soul through various feats of acting.

Submitted by Jane Grey