Martin Sherman's tribute to Isadora Duncan has taken a circuitous route to the West End and, unusually, has become a more profound play along the way. Sheila Gish's Duncan at the King's Head three years ago was foolish, blowsy and flamboyant, here Vanessa Redgrave in the same part touches on tragedy providing a fleeting insight into the heart of a genius whose work only lives on in the inadequate recollections of those who saw her or in the bad imitations of her slavish followers.
Sherman's play is set in 1923: Duncan is living in Paris, broke, raddled and disastrously married to the much younger Russian poet Sergei Esenin, played with devastating charisma by Oleg Menshikov. She speaks no Russian; he no English and the introduction of Frances de la Tour's bizarre interpreter, Miss Belzer, does little to help their relationship. Sherman creates a Tower of Babel onstage, effectively dramatising the incomprehension that confronted Duncan during her lifetime and climaxing in a calamitous dinner party of lobster and champagne in which Duncan attempts to persuade the supposed Italian cultural attache (Kevin Elyot) to provide her with enough money to open a school in Naples. The man is more clerk than cultural and much taken with Michael Sheen's delightful Greek pianist who heroically attempts to translate. Worst of all he admires the elephantine attempts of a young Swedish disciple to imitate her idol. The humorous send-up of Duncan's Bohemian lifestyle could be more pronounced - flamboyance is not a characteristic one associates with Redgrave - but in her mercurial performance the complexity of Duncan is revealed. Duncan was an artist whose work reached out and touched people emotionally in a way that few others have achieved; as re-created by Redgrave it makes for a strangely disturbing evening.

Submitted by Jane Grey