Theatre
When She Danced (Globe)
Bohemian rhapsody
Christopher Edwards
Martin Sherman's play about the leg- endary American dancer Isadora Duncan is given a lavish staging at the Globe. Bob Crowley's Parisian interior sets the piece's tone of fading splendour: peeling gold-leaf pillars, a chandelier on a long, blue cord and 'tall, shuttered windows that can either let in floods of light or keep the outside world tightly locked out. It is in this room, circa 1923, that we discover La Duncan (Vanessa Redgrave) sleeping off the night before on the floor. At her side is her very young, petulant, egotistical, soi-disant Bol- shevik Russian poet husband, Sergei (Oleg Menshikov). Duncan is now aged 45. She has not danced publicly for some time. The demands of her extravagant life have taken their toll on her physique and her pocket. She has lost her two children in a car acci- dent. Her gaiety, we are led to understand, is shot through with desperate sadness.
`Good morning, it's afternoon,' she says through her hangover. Champagne bottles litter the floor. The chandelier too has let its hair down; it lies crumpled in a heap. Then Duncan groans and remembers she has a rehearsal at four. Her disapproving French maid Jeanne (Sheila Keith) brings in coffee. Sergei wakes up. He is tired, ever amorous and, because throughout the play he speaks only Russian, quite incompre- hensible both to most of the audience and, particularly, to his wife. This does not faze Isadora. He is clearly a genius. She doesn't need literally to understand his verse to know that. Language, she reckons, is over- rated. 'We never had it in America.' Next there arrives her American friend Mary (Alison Fiske). Mary is devoted to Isadora and is a hustler. She is trying to negotiate a contract for the hard-up dancer in Vienna. Enter Miss Belzer (Frances de la Tour). Nobody can work out who she is until they remember that they met her somewhere and that she speaks Russian and English. She acts as interpreter for the boy wonder poet who is incredibly rude. The gathering is completed by the arrival of another genius, a 19-year-old Greek pianist called Alexandros (Michael Sheen).
This portrait of Isadora Duncan projects her as a dizzy creature of fancy, passion, unworldliness and despair. This is the high- er plane inhabited by artists, a plane at which the Miss Belzers of this world can only gape or serve. Vanessa Redgrave lends her considerable presence to the por- trait and almost manages to make her come alive. She has, of course, enormous physical grace, as well as the emotional control that can switch the character through her myriad moods. The problem I had with the play was that it seemed to peddle a type of touristic vision of la vie bohemienne. Duncan has no cash, she is feckless, extravagant, gives wild parties where philistines get bombarded with crockery, has a mad poet husband half her age who swings from the chandelier, sells her dining table to pay for dinner, kisses the feet of other artists and subscribes credulously to the Russian revolution. All this sounds a bit like an American's post- card home describing 'lifestyle' on the Left Bank.
Martin Sherman, who is American, is, however, somewhat cannier than this sum- mary allows. Duncan's politics, for inst- ance, are well and truly dunked in absurdity. She postures about at dinner draped in the red flag and can say things like, 'I was the first communist, honest. We need that money'. All the same, I came to feel that the play was turning more and more into a romping account of a personal- ity and life than any kind of satisfactory dramatisation. And, in confirmation, the playwright has a closing scene of conscious, low, bun-throwing farce, where Isadora entertains an Italian filing clerk (Kevin Elyot) to dinner under the mistaken impression that he is an influential diplo- mat who will give her a school in Naples.
Throughout the production we never, of course, see Duncan dance. Reports of her magical performances are given to us by her devoted followers. During the 'rehear- sal' she stands stockstill, bare-shouldered and draped in white cloth, while a Chopin Etude is played to her. 'I never rehearse with my feet,' she intones. Just how per- ilously balanced in subjectivity her art is is devastatingly demonstrated when an ado- lescent pupil of one of her proteges per- forms a 'Duncan' piece for her party and turns in a series of jerky, affected poses, swoops and rushes lacking any artistry whatever. The scene is both funny and bleak, and for a moment we can share Duncan's horrified apprehension of what posterity will make of her legacy. As she says at an earlier point in the play, 'Once everyone wanted to look like me. Now everyone does'. On one level the produc- tion can be enjoyed as a boulevard romp. Anyone going to the Globe in search of anything more penetrating or affecting might, however, be disappointed.
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