Vanessa Redgrave emerges from a dressing room, bends her 5ft 11in frame under a low ceiling beam, settles into a sagging pink couch and reaches for a ginger nut biscuit to go with her tea. Since February, she has been appearing at the Cherry Lane in The Revisionist, alongside the play's writer and co-star Jesse Eisenberg, who was nominated for an Academy Award after portraying Facebook's founder in The Social Network (2010).  Eisenberg, who appears to have kept the Mark Zuckerberg hoodie for the part, plays an antic, obnoxious young New York author who has come to stay in a city near the Baltic with Redgrave's Maria, a distant Polish cousin, in a vain effort to overcome writer's block. The gulf of experience and language between them provides for comic moments but the theme is isolation. Redgrave's purposeful, detailed portrayal, whether turning a telephone dial, folding a tablecloth or tapping her long fingers before pouring from a vodka bottle, lends an intense grandeur to Maria, a character defined by the family she lost in the Holocaust.  “I may find it rather hard to start to describe what I'm actually in at this point,” she starts, speaking softly, but “when I read it I thought it was the most extraordinary writing.” She likens the script to a core sample, with layers which may or may not all be picked up by the audience. “It's taken me a long time to pick up some of it. A long time.”  To prepare for the role, which involves extended sections of Polish dialogue, she sought out language tuition at the Kosciuszko Foundation on New York's Upper East Side and immersed herself in the films of Andrzej Wajda, the director of Katyn (2007). Redgrave, who stood for parliament as a candidate for the Workers Revolutionary Party in the 1970s, briefly gets diverted in discussing the film's portrayal of the German and Soviet invasions of Poland before returning to the script.  She was never a good musician, she says, “but I know that in a score you've got an interpretation but you've also got a score that is absolutely precise. That doesn't mean there won't be 10 very different interpretations, for those who've got ears. Nevertheless, it's written with a precision that has to be taken on board by the conductor and musicians. I wouldn't say that a lot of good plays are written like that.” Eisenberg's script, she says, “is written with a precision, which I find very exciting”. The language makes it challenging too: with each “a” or “the” that Maria's poor English takes away, “a rhythm vanishes and a truth vanishes.”  Eisenberg approached Redgrave after seeing her portray Joan Didion on stage in The Year of Magical Thinking. He asked whether she wanted to perform The Revisionist in a different theatre but she told him to stay with the Cherry Lane, where he put on Asuncion, another of his plays, in 2011. Camera angles in a film “tell a story as much as the script”, she says, and the Cherry Lane's small stage evokes the claustrophobia of Maria's small flat.  Redgrave's extended run in The Revisionist is due to end this weekend but on May 2 she will appear in a short film for Sky Arts, The Call Out. The writer and director is Carlo Nero, her son from her relationship with Franco Nero, who played Lancelot to her Guinevere in the 1967 film Camelot and became her second, unofficial husband in 2006.  Redgrave's role is just called “elderly woman” in the film's credits. “It's a lovely name, whereas Maria calls herself an old woman, which she is. It's sweet,” she says. Her character is a confused widow who asks a policeman to investigate voices she is hearing in her bathroom and keeps him there at 2am for tea, sandwiches and a rare moment of companionship. “It's so long since I've had someone over for tea,” her character explains, telling her guest she feels invisible when she walks outside.  Does she see similarities between the two characters? “No, I don't, otherwise you would have to say every 76-year-old is the same and they're not,” she replies, with a pointed smile. But the theme, again, is loneliness among the old and young, and isolation from families in particular.  I have been told before the interview that Redgrave does not want to talk about the rest of her family, a dynasty of four generations of actors. The daughter of Sir Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson, whose birth was announced on the Old Vic stage by Laurence Olivier, lost her own daughter, Natasha Richardson, to a skiing accident in 2009 when the latter was just 45. The next year, her sister Lynn and brother Corin, fellow actors, also died.  I ask about the experience of being directed by her son in The Call Out. “I respect him immensely as a man and as a director,” she replies. “Perhaps it is odd but I say I loved working with him.”  Redgrave says she has worked with members of her family so often that she has never found it unusual. “I've never sought it or tried to make it happen but I've been thrilled when it has.” The director of photography on The Call Out is her nephew, Corin's son Luke Redgrave, whose name she mentions in a meticulous accounting of all the people who deserve credit at the production company, Sprout Pictures, and at Sky Arts, which she praises for backing short films.  It is a format Redgrave loves. “Some of my favourite writing is in the short story form,” she says, citing Guy de Maupassant and Katherine Mansfield. “They seem to bring out, in a very special and particular way, characters. And a brief perspective that's very penetrating. It doesn't run along the surface the way we're all used to.”  Few short films find such an outlet. Redgrave is optimistic and informed about the chances that digital streaming will improve the business model for independent filmmakers but says pessimism about the prospects for new writing is “founded on fact, unfortunately”.  She worries about the implications for younger members of her profession. “The pay will be pretty poor for a long time. Too many lovely, wonderful young people working for nothing, as interns, which I think is abominable.”  Redgrave no longer describes herself as a Marxist but remains a lightning rod for injustice, 35 years after she was heckled at the 1978 Oscars for her support of Palestinian independence and her speech about “a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums whose behaviour is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world”.  She looks downcast as she begins to eat a banana, and seems not to notice that a picture of Edna St Vincent Millay, the activist Greenwich Village poet, hangs on the green room's wall as I ask what the focus of her activism is now.  “Well, I've never had much to do with activism but it is a word I accept is generically used,” she says. I press her to explain and she says the term often implies something “without much thought attached to it”. She will still use her fame (which she describes as “the respect that some people seem to have, just as I have respect for some people”) to get a meeting at the State Department for a pressing issue but the theatre is now “where I put myself”.  “It sometimes means putting myself in Kosovo and it sometimes means putting myself in the West End and it sometimes means putting myself in Cherry Lane,” she continues. In 1999, she staged a festival of theatre, dance and music in Kosovo with the United Nations Children's Fund. “But I'm always with a group of people who feel... it's important. It just is a value we can't let go and it's something we care about and love doing. It's more terrifying than loving, actually.” Redgrave says she does not even consider her stances political but is just speaking out for human rights principles.
New York's Cherry Lane Theatre is tucked away at the end of a street of Greenwich Village townhouses that is empty most of the day and intimately lit at night when audiences arrive. Above its 179-seat main stage is a cramped green room whose collection of stained mugs and mismatched chairs gives it the look of a shabby student flat. It is not where you picture one of the greatest actresses of her generation choosing to spend her afternoons at the age of 76.