The questions at issue in Martin Sherman's "When She Danced" are whether the aging, stony-broke Isadora Duncan will make a comeback in Vienna and raise the money to found a school in Italy. As both projects are clearly doomed, there is not much in the way of narrative grip; what we get instead is a perspective of Duncan's life from the viewpoint of one chaotic day in her Paris home attended by a devoted little court and her wild poet husband, Sergei Esenin.
When this piece appeared at the King's Head three years ago, it seemed that Sherman was hitching a lift on his heroine: capitalizing on her fame while scoring easy laughs against her as a gushing art-fancier and farcical American in Europe; and leaving the audience to decide whether her school would have been a liberationist paradise or a dilettante catastrophe.
The play has undergone a marked change in Robert Allan Ackerman's revival, and not only through the factitious biographical parallels between its heroine and its star, Vanessa Redgrave. Redgrave leaves you in no doubt that you are in the presence of a major artist - so that textual ambiguity is resolved. She also gives a precise, unsentimental portrait of a character of unbounded emotional generosity who is incapable of direct antagonism - except in defence of her art, at which point Redgrave pitches into the offender with a healthy cry of "Asshole!" The supporting cast is brilliant: particularly Alison Fiske as the bossily helpful old friend; Frances de la Tour as a dowdy refugee translator whose self-effacing nonentity steals attention from the flamboyant leads; and Oleg Menshikov (playing in Russian) whose understated violence and rhapsodic sexuality enable you to see the appeal of a round-the-clock drunk who swings on the chandelier in his underpants, and celebrates the death of Isadora's children in verse. Redgrave's response is almost too painful to watch. The play is still out of focus; but it is full of life.

Submitted by Jane Grey