When She Danced, a play about Isadora Duncan, omits the one detail everyone knows about her life: the gruesome way in which it ended. Her trailing scarf was caught in the wheel of her speeding Bugatti: strangled by chiffon. In other hands this might have become a metaphor for the artistic asphyxiation of a frivolous decade, but what we have in Martin Sherman's play is a rather camp celebration of creative folk with Isadora (played by Vanessa Redgrave) centre stage.
You will find on display at the Globe Theatre all the behavioural cliches of bohemian Paris as we watch a single day in the life of the penniless Duncan household. Champagne is swigged from the bottle, plates are thrown, laughter follows tantrums bills go unpaid, gutters are fallen into, and Art is worshipped by all. Glum French menials do the cleaning up.
Central to Isadora's coterie is her brattish poet lover, Sergei Esenin (historically the John McEnroe of Russian elegiac poetry) played by the Soviet star Oleg Menshikov, who genuinely speaks no English and leaps athletically about the stage like a spoilt chimp, contemptuous of everything except his own (now forgotten) talent.
Acting as their interpreter is Frances de la Tour, the star-struck Miss Belzer, an emigre who translates their rows tactfully from beneath her cloche hat. She had once seen Isadora dance and it had changed her life. Besides Miss Belzer, there is a tolerant American friend (Alison Fiske), a teenage Swedish acolyte, a Greek concert pianist (Michael Sheen) who claims he is a pederast, and an Italian filing-clerk whom everyone thinks is a vice-consul.
The play is conducted in five, or was it six, languages. I tell you, this is what all English theatre will sound like if we press ahead with Federalism.
The challenge to Vanessa Redgrave in this comedy of misunderstanding is to convey the spirit of the dancer without ever taking a step. She appears bare-armed, her cropped hair red with henna. She can be brashly American ("Sergei Alexandrovich, I look like s***!"), but this is a portrait of a sensitive, funloving egoist, haunted by the death of her two children and fearful that her work will not survive her.
The famous Redgrave ability to make transparent the inner life of any part she takes on is in evidence here. In fact the play is spiced up by the unignorable parallel between actress and subject. Here is a woman swathed in a tunic embossed with the hammer and sickle, espousing Bolshevism, trailing a mighty reputation into an increasingly distant past.
She stands as the emancipated spirit of her age, the original champagne socialist, whose genius, according to this play, was to make something public out of something intensely private. You feel at times Redgrave isn't playing a role at all.
But for the most part this is a not over-funny boulevard comedy about self-absorbed artists, with something extra to say about the inadequacy of language.
Robert Allan Ackerman's production on Bob Crawley's chalk-blue salon set is dotted with good performances, but even the maturely graceful Vanessa Redgrave manages to only partially haul the evening out of a rather saccharine bog of sentimentality.

Submitted by Jane Grey