If art is a land of language, what are its words? Does it have rules, the way language has grammar? Can you learn it? Is it translatable? If art is a language, what was Isadora Duncan saying when she danced? "When She Danced" (Globe) was first done at the King's Head three years ago; now Martin Sherman's play re-emerges, subtly but substantially rewritten, with greater depth and resonance, haunting and melancholy, but also ribald and savage and poignantly funny.
Isadora Duncan was a star, which means that she was essentially solitary and yet depended for her very lifeblood on her audiences. Star performers are great impersonal providers: whatever their private lives, they burn most brightly when they are unapproachable in public, and their art feeds the spectators whose presence nourishes them in turn. "Anyone can dance," Sherman's Isadora says, "all you have to do is listen." Strictly speaking, this sentence is incorrect, but the sense is clear: dance, for Isadora, is like speech cast in the language of the body. It is a form of almost irrational communication, like silent vibrations which spectators register in their bodies and souls. This is why, as we see later in the play, such art cannot be taught: technique can be mere imitation, an empty shell.
Stars are also infinitely suggestive. In their presence anything is possible. When we describe an actor as having a sense of danger, we really mean that he or she suggests a sense of potential. It is a body language of eloquent stillness, of a calm before what may or may not become a storm.
Vanessa Redgrave plays Isadora, which means that the role and the actor face each other on equal terms. She understands perfectly the language of imminent potential. She stands upstage, listening to someone talking about her art, clad in nothing but a sheet, utterly still, her face subtly transfigured by introspection, and you feel that she might suddenly move, break into dance, show you the bodily shape of artistic excitement. But the whole point of Sherman's play is that Duncan's artistry is recalled for us, for better or for worse, for richer or poorer, by people who experienced it. In the last analysis, Sherman argues, art lives in you and me. In the end, it doesn't even matter whether you were there. After all, it the essence of an artistic experience can be communicated, it must be after the event; the actual experience is not communicable because in those moments it possesses you completely.
In this respect, art is like love; and another of Sherman 's themes is the dialogue between the two. We are in 1923, when Isadora was 45 and married to the Russian poet Esenin (Oleg Menshikov), an insatiable, predatory grown-up child in permanent sexual overdrive who uses his comprehension of other languages as both an aggressive weapon and a shield. Isadora thinks that they love each other across or even because of the language barrier; but when a shabby woman interpreter of dubious nationality (Frances de la Tour) arrives, the magic cracks. She translates one of his poems for Isadora and she reads in it not his inspiration but her own life - just as her audiences do in her dancing. Which is the right reading? Is art any better at crossing frontiers than love? Which has more to do with life? Sherman is writing about the precarious beauty of art as well as the brutality with which it can dominate people. Redgrave's acting is hard, translucent and sculptural, painfully realistic but without a shred of exhibitionism or self-indulgence. Like some mysterious radio-active material, she remains in cool control but radiates the intense heat of feeling.
This is a case of the role possessing the actor and the actor being in complete control of the role.

Submitted by Jane Grey