Two great things about this show from director Robert Shaw’s company Inside Intelligence: the source material and its solo star.
The former is a cache of love letters written by iconic dancer Isadora Duncan. A fascinating and contradictory character, Duncan’s own words reveal her to be passionate, vulnerable, spirited, inspired and a bloody good letter writer – idiosyncratic of syntax and a natural dramatist.
Portraying Duncan here means not only carrying off an intense hour-and-20-minute monologue, but also embodying the dancer, earthy but flighty, possessed by Terpsichore. Anna-Marie Paraskeva does it brilliantly, in a totally engaged and committed performance that’s warm, real and bewitching.
But you can’t escape the one-sided nature of the format (we hear only Duncan’s missives, and not the replies). The pledges of adoration become shrill and repetitive. There’s intrigue in being left to imagine the gaps, but a life like Duncan’s hardly needs embellishment, and when there is genuine tragedy – the accidental death of Duncan’s two children – the revelation doesn’t deliver the seismic jolt it should. As good as Duncan’s words are, some dramaturgical intervention might have helped her soar.