In a tall, faded Empire-style Parisian apartment, dominated by a peeling gold column and musty blue silk drapes, (lovely designs by Bob Crowley not well served by Arden Fingerhut's bland lighting) lives Isadora, now no longer a young slip of a girl but still swathed in classical-style robes and scarves. With her is volatile Russian revolutionary poet Sergei. They share no language but understand each other perfectly, or at least, as perfectly as they dare. Each worships the other's genius and each is a match for each other's libido - no mean feat, so it seems.
With the arrival of Russian emigre, the anonymous Miss Belzer who is engaged to act as interpreter between the lovers, dark clouds begin to spoil Isadora's blue draped horizons. A poem that Sergei recites frequently, and with such fervour that Isadora is transported every time, is translated by the unfortunate Miss Belzer and revealed to be about a dog watching her puppies drowned, a sadistic trivialisation of Isadora's enduring grief for two children who drowned. Isadora realises the poem was intended to wound, but Sergei denies it and storms out in a rage of hurt that Isadora failed to understand his art.
In this moment, Martin Sherman powerfully captures an essence of the relationship, with every nuance of complexity, cruelty and also tenderness. Vanessa Redgrave is utterly right as the dancer, with her languorous limbs, her slightly batty charm, her distracted egocentricity, and Oleg Menshikov as the dipsomaniac poet, cruel, child-like and suffocated (willingly?) by the relationship. After his rift with Isadora you cannot believe that he will win her round, but does so with such exuberant charm that you can't help but be glad. Between them - writer, actors and director Robert Allan Ackerman, foil the fate Sergei taunts her with - that a dancer's art dies with her, while a poet lives on through his words. It is a clever conceit of the play that we newer see her dance either, we just hear others talking about it. But the play doesn't do anything other than commemorate and celebrate Isadora. It is oddly dispassionate, while the real tragedy, the more interesting play, perhaps, remains hidden, with only the tip of Frances de la Tour's Miss Belzer iceberg visible. Overlooked, the unwillinging harbinger of dischord, Miss Belzer once saw Isadora dance in Leningrad and it changed her life. She longs to be close to her, and is entranced by this tempestuous polyglot household, but by her very presence is writing herself out of the drama.
A rather thin play but sumptuous looking and featuring of big emotions writ large, and entrancing for that.

Submitted by Jane Grey