Vanessa Redgrave is having another go at playing the most important dancer of the twentieth century, Isadora Duncan, some 20 years after she played Isadora in the film. You can see why people link the two. It is, part of Vanessa's legend, like Isadora's, that she can be incandescent and that her left wing politics make her a controversial figure.
But, though she doesn't have to dance this time, she is still all wrong. Isadora, who was famous for proclaiming that her body's dance core was the solar plexus, used to stand still and let music irradiate her from that centre of levity out-wards. When Vanessa stands and listens to music, she is slimmer and sharper than Isadora was in the year of this play - 1923 - but she has no motion in stillness.
She merely Thinks Great Thoughts from the collarbone upwards until her eyes brim with tears. A key scene in the play, Vanessa cannot bring it off.
In most other respects she gives the performance that this neatly tacky play asks for. This Isadora is a befuddled, sozzled, helpless, half-glamorous bore, a thoroughly camp fag-hag icon on the skids, but with a sense of humour. The fact she doesn't dance is the play's point. Younger characters long to see her dance just once, older characters remember how her dancing once changed their lives, but Isadora is dried-up, if not dried-out. When she isn't being gauche, louche, muddled or jokey, she snivels and whines in self-pity.
"When She Danced" is a farce, with bits of sadness and dance-history tacked on. Isadora, who here speaks no Russian, is married to Sergei Esenin, who speaks nothing else. They sell the furniture to pay for the champagne, and they are surrounded by cartoon-like hangers-on.
Sherman makes occasional points about the irony that Isadora has outlived her art ars brevis, vita longa but he handles her decline with such ghoulish relish that you know where his heart lies. His Isadora and Sergei aren't real, they are artfully crazy theatrical types. They torment each other, they get wildly drunk, they smash crockery, they make love, they behave like kids and are cleaned up after by a humourless French maid.
Sherman does not want to portray Isadora's intelligence or adult seriousness. Impossible to believe from this play, or from Vanessa's performance, that Isadora was steeped in Whitman, Nietzsche and Wagner, that she denounced jazz and the foxtrot, that she was a feminist, that she had intense discussions with Stanislavsky. Or that her Moscow school of dance survived till after the Second World War. Or that there is enough documentation on her work to show how way ahead her dances were of other barefoot dancers of her day.
Robert Allan Ackerman, who also directed the 1985 premiere, handles the action for as many laughs as possible. The ludicrous dinner party in Act Two, with six (later seven) different languages going on, climaxes in - can you believe it? - a custard-pie joke. Graham Lustig has choreographed a dance for an Isadora disciple which is clever as a deliberate parody of Isadora but ludicrous as the sincere imitation it is supposed to be.
Most of the performances are on the cheap level of the play. Michael Sheen plays the gay Greek teenage pianist Eliopolos as half Rik Mayall ("The Young Ones"), half Manuell ("Fawlty Towers"). Alison Fiske plays Isadora's best friend Mary Desti as a parody of an American gorgon, and Sheila Keith is the French maid. Each is a national caricature, more or less atrocious.
As Sergei, the Soviet actor Oleg Menshikov has real drive humour and freshness. His role is another stereotype - the uncouth, huggable, cute wild-boy - but he plays it beautifully. The way he kisses Isadora in waltz-time is the evening's only stroke of theatrical magic.
And Frances de la Tour speaking excellent Russian, is first-rate in the play's one interesting role, the unknown Hannah Beltzer, who translates Esenin's most explicit statements into English but who never gets to tell Isadora how her dancing once illumined her whole existence. She has an inner life, like a character from Balzac or Maupassant. And as with no one else on stage, you want to know more about her.

Submitted by Jane Grey