Martin Sherman's "When She Danced" first seen three years ago at the King's Head in a much more intimate production with a different cast and director, seems to have lost something in its translation to a more lavish and starry West End staging. It is rather like watching a French art-house movie remade by Hollywood in VistaVision and Technicolor.
True, the present casting does allow Vanessa Redgrave to revisit the role of the doomed dancer Isadora Duncan, which she first played on film in 1968, but it is precisely her stardom and blazing confidence in the role that robs the play of one of its most important questions, that concerning the actual importance of being Isadora. Unlike the biopic movie, "When She Danced" does not attempt to give us complete life of Isadora: nothing here of her years of success, nor of the death by scarf-strangulation in an early automobile for which she is now probably best remembered. Instead, Sherman focuses on Isadora in Paris in 1923, already bankrupt and catastrophically married to a suicidal Russian poet half her age.
Their court-in-exile is made up of a down-trodden interpreter (Frances de la Tour) and various other hangers-on, through whom Sherman raises all the right questions about Isadora's art and her claims to posterity. But where Sheila Gish in the first production left us to make up our own minds about whether her talent really made up for social and economic lunacy on a grand scale, Redgrave bludgeons us into total acceptance, and as she does so, we lose perspective.
Like Esther Williams, who was a star only when wet, Isadora was a star only when she danced, hence that title. Here the contrasts between the realities of her Parisian poverty and the constant expectation of terpsichorean triumph in gargantuan dancing schools are blurred by the director Robert Ackerman's decision to replace a play with a star turn.

Submitted by Jane Grey