For those who admired Isadora Duncan, she was the most adored dancer of her generation. For those who thought she was an eccentric Terpsichorean accident, her free-flowing movements, with their virginal gymnastics, were derided as the essence of pseudery.
Martin Sherman, who wrote "When She Danced", wisely avoids any opportunity for us to decide which of these opposing ranks we would be likely to join. Isadora does not dance. In this delightful account of her late years as a dancer - it is 1923 and she is 45 in Paris - we are permitted only to see Isadora poised and still, and a parody of her style performed by an untalented acolyte. Because of her indifference to money Isadora has been reduced to selling her furniture to keep her supplied with the champagne she loves. Complicating her life are the bleak memories of her two young children drowned in the Seine, and her marriage to the turbulent Russian revolutionary poet Sergei Esenin, whose idea of a tranquil evening was hanging upside-down from a chandelier.
Whatever they had in common, except sex and a penchant for temperamental postures, was obscured by their inability to speak each other's language.
Amongst the stream of visitors with an avid desire to come in contact with this contemporary goddess, is the dowdy, mousey Miss Belzer, who cannot forget the night she saw Isadora dance. Because she speaks Russian, she becomes for a short time the linguistic link between this ill-associated pair, and Francis de la Tour is both touching and funny in the part.
As Sergei, Oleg Menshikov gives a pyrotechnic display of Slavic temperament with every gesture and emotional blow and every nuance a blunt instrument. This is the kind of poet that gives revolutions a violent name.
Against such histrionic competition, Vanessa Redgrave is forced to subdue the expected artistic flamboyance of a character like Isadora.
The result is a performance of magnificent restraint in which echoes of a blazing resolve and uninhibited impulses have given way to a deep sadness about the past, and modest hope for the future. Michael Sheen is excellent as a 19-year-old Greek concert pianist whose worship of Isadora, who his mother had once seen dance, reaches both frantic and poignant proportions.
Robert Ackerman's clever direction matches in its orchestration of the chaos of erratic genius the sharply-written dialogue of Martin Sherman's sparkling play.

Submitted by Jane Grey