Teddy and Topsy, Old Red Lion, London<br/>Henri Oguike, Linbury Studio, London

On the road with Isadora &ndash; a woman who promised more fun than a fox hunt

The single thing people know about Isadora Duncan, if they know anything, is that she died in an accident involving an open-top car and a scarf.

That lurid factoid is unavailable to Teddy and Topsy, a one-woman show that presents the early-20th-century dance pioneer through her letters to her lover, the English theatre director-designer Edward ("Teddy") Gordon Craig, as she endlessly toured Europe and South America with her own one-woman show. Dances based on archive of Duncan's free-flowing, barefoot style (which single-handedly laid the foundations of modern dance), are skilfully interleaved with these episodic monologues.

Duncan was, and remains, a fascinating figure, a Californian free spirit who trounced Edwardian mores by having two children by different fathers, marrying neither, and refusing to give up her itinerant career – a whirl of sold-out theatres in Paris, Venice, Berlin, St Petersberg, Rio .... But as the letters reveal, even the grandest hotel décor palled in the face of physical exhaustion, insomnia and loneliness. Hence the three-letters-a-day habit that provides the grist for this pungent studio show, written and directed by Robert Shaw, whose grandfather toured with Duncan and worked closely with Craig.

Young performer Anna-Marie Paraskeva, who also choreographed the dances, finds an equally authentic-seeming empathy with her subject. Mellifluous of voice and fulsomely rounded of movement, she negotiates the feverish highs and truculent lows of the letters with fine dramatic pacing, and manages the switch from speech to perfumed dance (to recorded Chopin) with aplomb – not easy in a pub theatre so intimate that "elbows in" is as crucial a feature of audience etiquette as "mobiles off".

Over an hour and a half, Duncan's needy endearments, detailing Craig's "dear kind eyes and dear kind smile" begin to wear thin, but in feistier mode her correspondence is compelling. Approaching St Petersburg, she notes darkly: "This feels like one of those cities where they plot things." Flirting, she writes: "If you'll only pursue me, I'll be more fun than a fox hunt!"

The hazard of the show's format is its selectivity: not a word from Craig till near the end (a stiff recorded reading by Hugh Bonneville), nor any hint of Duncan's other loves – and she had many, not least a Russian poet who inspired her to help orphans of the 1917 Revolution. Nonetheless, Teddy and Topsy is vividly realised, a reminder of a distant, pre-telephonic age. If Paraskeva could just bear to leave off her bra under that grecian drapery, and go native underarm, the authenticity would feel complete.

Similarly scaled down in personnel, but big in impact, is the new touring show by choreographer Henri Oguike. As always, he makes some daring choices, not least to drench the opener, Freq, in fierce jets of water. To noodling electronics (Brian Eno and David Byrne) dancer Elena Zaino stands in a flimsy frock as a shower pelts her from above, the spray's glancing trajectory altering course dramatically with her slightest move, then slicing horizontally as she builds momentum, swinging her sopping hair like a fifth limb, and finally dissolving into darkly glinting sparks under the effect of strobe.

Less bracing, in fact positively soporific, is Butterfly Dreaming, about a man who dreams he's an insect, wakes up to find he isn't, then isn't quite sure .... Whatever, it reads like an opium trip in the dark, which is to say, like watching someone else having one – not nearly so interesting in anyone's book.

'Teddy and Topsy': to 26 Mar (020-7837 7816). Henri Oguike: Guildford Electric Theatre (01483 444 789) Tuesday

Next Week:

Jenny Gilbert catches up with English National Ballet post-TV exposure, in its Black & White programme

Dance Choice

In a programme to please all tastes, the Royal Ballet conjures animal magic in its first revival in 18 years of David Bintley's Still Life at the Penguin Café. Frederick Ashton's Rhapsody offers virtuosity, while Alastair Marriott's Sensorium, above, explores the shifting atmospheres of Debussy's Preludes. Royal Opera House (020-7304 4000), from Wed.