"It's been a lovely dinner," laughs Isadora Duncan a touch desperately, "Nobody's understood a blasted word anyone's said." Communication problems are rife throughout Martin Sherman's "When She Danced". To begin with - although la langue d'amour clearly presents few difficulties to the dancer and her young husband, the Russian poet Esenin - intercourse of a more verbal kind has to be conducted through a specially-hired interpreter.
In their Paris flat, a disgruntled maid keeps up a stream of aggrieved French, while visitors include a young Greek concert pianist, a man they take to be an Italian diplomat, and a girl admirer who blubbers in a blur of Swedish when reproved. Linguistically, this is a menage that might faze even Anthony Burgess.
The farcical misunderstandings that ensue form a comic background to a more wistful sense of the limits of what is communicable. Though a number of her devotees make the attempt in intense monologues, none can re-evoke Isadora's dancing for us. Instead we get vague descriptions of the effect of her performance ("this walk of hers was like a comet shooting through my body" or gaseous rhapsodies like "when she moves across the stage, she is in touch with the Divine") which may tell us a lot about the impressionabilities of the speakers but hardly help us to see her in dazzling motion.
"When She Danced" presents a day in the life of Isadora not at the height of her fame, but in 1923 at a low point in her fortunes - recently branded a "Bolshevik whore" in the US, where she had toured to raise funds for the Soviet Union, and reduced to selling her furniture in an effort to keep herself (and her self-obsessed husband) in the quality of champagne to which they feel entitled. Middle-aged and losing her looks, she retains nonetheless a belief that she can teach mankind beauty through dance and is hoping to open a school in Italy.
Sporting a mussed-up hennaed crop and panda rings of smudged mascara, Vanessa Redgrave emerges blearily at the start from beneath a moth-eaten velvet cover. She looks like the last person to whom you would want to entrust the young, as she surveys the wreckage in her vast living room and shrugs in hung-over puzzlement at the collapsed chandelier. But it's one of the achievements of the play and of this fine performance that they convince you that there was genuine goodness and an indomitable idealism in Isadora despite all the artiness and strenuous Bohemianism.
Like Robert Allan Ackerman's production, Redgrave's portrayal can modulate beautifully between broad farce and moments of painful desolation. There is a scene, for example, where Oleg Menshikov's charismatic, childishly demanding Esenin recites one of his poems, with many a melodramatic fist-clench. Though she cannot understand a word of the Russian, Isadora is in raptures and can't be restrained from kissing his feet. Then, to the comic dismay of the frumpy interpreter (an excellent Frances de la Tour), Esenin demands she translate and Isadora, who has never got over the death of her own children by drowning, learns via an idiotic prose-rendering that the poem she raved over is about a bitch bewailing the similar fate of her puppies. Expertly played, the sequence flickers through conflicting moods and ends with gulping sobs from Miss Redgrave so harrowingly real that this reviewer had to turn away.
"I just listen to the music in my soul and I dance - just that," says Isadora, as incapable of putting her art into words as her fans. "Yes, but what type of dance is that?" the Italian diplomat asks her through Michael Sheen's hilarious concert pianist. It's typical of this play that it allows you to see what it respects from ridiculous angles - for example the closest we get to witnessing an Isadora performance is in a grotesque travesty of it by the talentless Swede.
Similarly, the great champion of the poor in Soviet Russia is seen to recognise at the end that she knows next to nothing about the poor Russian interpreter under her nose. Unlike many plays about geniuses, this one does not alienate, partly because it shows that people who are not even talented matter too.

Submitted by Jane Grey