Isabella Rossellini, Queen Elizabeth Hall - comedy review

"We are talking about sex tonight," explained Isabella Rossellini as she stood at the front of the stage and received an ovation before she had even started. As career swerves go this takes some beating. The film star, model and former face of Lancome has latterly become passionate about passion in nature. Forget her Blue Velvet, her latest project is Green Porno, a touring monologue about reproduction.

David Attenborough this was not. While they both share a similar commitment to their subject, the 61-year-old daughter of Hollywood legend Ingrid Bergman adopts a more method acting approach. Short illustrative sketches projected onscreen featured the chic star dressed variously as a multiple-eyed spider, a sadomasochistic snail and a male praying mantis, whose head is bitten off during lovemaking.

Cannibalism, in fact, turned out to be a theme. It is not every day you see a glamorous woman clad in a hamster costume and devouring her young. The brisk lecture was frequently played for flirtatious laughs and even this gruesome sequence benefited from Rossellini’s deadpan, clownish charm.

But the pixie-haired performer has recently studied conservation and wanted to educate as much as entertain. After removing her elegant neck-to-floor black gown and popping on a moustache to underline how certain creatures can change gender, she revealed some of nature’s extremes, from duck rape to dolphins using their blowholes for sexual gratification.

If the audience was hoping for personal titbits they may have been disappointed. Though during a section on male pregnancy she recalled that she once thought her father, director Roberto Rossellini, was having a baby, only to realise that he was just a “fat Italian man”. For most of the packed auditorium, however, being in the presence of an icon was enough. Her detailed description of a barnacle’s penis was an added bonus.