Rarely can a play intended for an English-speaking audience have contained so much dialogue in foreign tongues as Martin Sherman's "When She Danced", at the Globe - some three years after it was first performed at the trail-breaking King's Head. One of its leading performers speaks entirely in Russian, another in Italian, a third in French, a fourth in Swedish, a fifth with a heavy Greek accent.
A further complication is that what the play celebrates is indescribable in any language.
Yet it works, works triumphantly, eloquent performances and skilful direction uniting with Sherman's subtle exploration of the ephemeral nature of dance as art. In short, what was it that Isadora Duncan did that was so wonderful when, even in her own time, she was devotedly followed by disciples who were to dance what McGonagall was to poetry?
It is Isadora ageing in Paris, selling her furniture for champagne, coping with her young husband, the crazy, charming, brutal, Russian poet, Esenin, with whom she could only communicate only horizontally, trying to raise money for schools which, in her naivety, she believed could form a bridge between Mussolini's Fascist Italy and, for this was 1923, Lenin's Soviet Union.
As Vanessa Redgrave plays Isadora, (…)
Is it careless direction by the otherwise impeccable director, Robert Allan Ackerman, or a deliberate ambiguity that leads to Miss Belzer, who has recalled the rabbi at her mother's deathbed, crossing herself at a moment of crisis?
Michael Sheen, straight from RADA, makes an impressive debut as the wild-eyed Greek pianist bursting with longing for life and love, whose mother named him after Isadora.
The final ludicrous dinner party thrown by Isadora to persuade an Italian of impressive coarseness to set up a school for her, achieves glorious confusion as the different languages reach impenetrable barriers of incomprehension. But if Duncan's art is now lost, Redgrave's is here to be savoured in all its magnificent maturity, the temptation to link them politically must be resisted, however irresistible it is as she walks with grace in a red caftan adorned with the hammer and sickle. The important thing is that she walks like a dancer, stoops, stiff-legged like a dancer, the body curving downwards like an inverted U. She stands still and is vibrant with energy; she is as compelling a presence as Isadora herself must have been and it is almost as difficult to pin down her art as it is with Isadora. "It can't be explained," is Sherman's last word on that subject.
There are other notable performances. Russian actor Oleg Menshikov plays the poet Esenin, all passion and play-acting, cruelty and callowness, whether insisting that a poem he has written about drowned puppies should be translated to Isadora whose children were drowned, or trying to hang himself from the chandelier in a gesture of artistic support.
An extraordinary character is introduced to link the two, the enigmatic Miss Belzer, who was born in Russia and is holding body and soul together in Paris with a threadbare coat. We never learn much about her for, though Isadora asks her questions, she never waits for an answer. There has been a family, a husband, a child, all lost and Frances de la Tour invests her with a terrible desolation when she dismisses her own history as unimportant because she is not an artist.

Submitted by Jane Grey