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Indeed, while Lynn and Vanessa rarely discuss acting technique and have not appeared together onstage, Vanessa has worked with both her daughters. Joely played Vanessa's character when young in flashback scenes of Wetherby. Natasha portrayed Nina, one of her mother's celebrated early roles, in a 1985 London staging of The Seagull that featured her mother as the virago actress Arkadina. Both daughters report receiving useful maternal advice. When Joely at 19 was cast to play the worldly, thirtyish title role in Miss Julie, Vanessa counseled, "Whatever insecurities you have, share with the audience. Be open, and they'll accept you more." When Natasha wrestled with Nina's madness-streaked fifth-act monologue, Vanessa spoke of technique: "I could be wrong, but I notice you have gotten into a slow pattern of speaking." Natasha speeded up; the problem was solved.
Both daughters say Redgrave relies heavily on props and research in developing a role, but does not misappropriate pieces of her own life or blur the line between reality and performance. "When she delivers emotion," says Natasha, "she doesn't do it by thinking of the cat's dying. And when she performs Lady in Orpheus Descending, she doesn't remain in character as she sips tea at intermission."
When the stage lights go back up, however, Vanessa Redgrave is Lady, a woman who has endured half a lifetime remembering her father's agonizing death by fire, only to discover that her husband led the killers. Nothing is histrionic in Redgrave's inhabitation of the part. Infatuation with a mysterious newcomer makes her faintly schoolgirlish. Pregnancy gives her a subtle glow. A plan for revenge on her husband sets only her eyes aglitter. The shifts are subtle, her mood lightly ironic. She greets her own violent death with a Mona Lisa smile of sad amusement and, as she crumples to the floor, a shrug.
The play's final image is a glimpse of her lover being carried, naked and screaming, to be murdered with a blowtorch. Yet what lingers is Redgrave, all the more poignant for the utter absence of any plea for sympathy. That is the public figure as much as the actress and the character: unapologetic, unrelenting and determined to the end to do things her way. For almost anyone else, Orpheus would be the highlight of a career. For Redgrave, it is another luminous interlude in a lifetime of incandescence.