The Haymarket has chosen an all-star vehicle to launch its new production venture. Daniel Rosenthal joins Peter Hall and Judi Dench in rehearsal Shortly before 10 o'clock on a Tuesday morning, Dame Judi Dench and Harriet Walter arrive at a church hall near Clap-ham Common for another day of rehearsals on The Royal Family, the 1920s Broadway comedy opening next week at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. Inside, they find their director, Sir Peter Hall, discussing technical details with Karen Smith, the deputy stage manager (DSM). The atmosphere is so relaxed you'd never guess how much is riding on The Royal Family's reception. Because the Haymarket needs a hit. Badly.

In the past two years, this most elegant of West End playhouses has been home to a sorry sequence of flops, including Collected Stories and Jeffrey Archer's The Accused. None of the Haymarket's last seven tenants managed to stay open for even three months, and the 950-seat auditorium has been dark since June. Dismayed by the consistently disappointing rental and box-office income, the Haymarket's management, the Louis I Michaels Group, has now taken the radical step of investing in production rather than simply renting out the theatre. It has established Theatre Royal Haymarket Productions to stage The Royal Family, in partnership with Kim Poster, of Stanhope Productions.

Arnold Crook, chairman of Louis I. Michaels, says the Haymarket hopes to produce or co-produce three 16-week runs a year. 'Commercially, we are jumping into very deep water,' says Crook. 'If three out of three of our shows work then we're well in front; if two out of three work then we're level; if none work we're in serious trouble.' Buoyed by The Royal Family's 'extremely healthy' box-office advance, Crook has complete faith in Hall, Dench and co's ability to end the Haymarket's losing streak. On the evidence of the rehearsals I watched, they will certainly be delivering plentiful entertainment, with a comedy that has been on Hall's 'plays I want to direct' list since he saw it revived on Broadway in 1976.

Written by George S Kaufman and Edna Ferber in 1927, and inspired by the Barrymore dynasty, The Royal Family focuses on three generations of the Cavendish acting clan. Fanny (Dench) is the 'managerial, pungent' 72-year-old who in the course of a frantic weekend at the family's Manhattan apartment must prevent three younger Cavendishes from quitting the profession: her movie-star son, Tony (Toby Stephens), her daughter and Broadway leading lady, Julie (Walter), and Julie's 19-year-old daughter, Gwen (newcomer Emily Blunt).

Hall's first target for the Tuesday rehearsals is the Fanny/Julie relationship. Dressed in civvies, Dench and Walter sit on a sofa positioned downstage centre on the hall's bare floorboards; Hall is on a chair a few yards in front of them and reminds Dench, whom he first worked with in 1962, that he's determined to defy his reputation for 'conducting rehearsals with my head buried in the text'. He leaves DSM Smith to follow the script while he watches Dench and Walter begin the Act One scene in which Julie announces that Gil Marshall, the emerald millionaire she almost married 19 years earlier, has come back into her life.

As reproachful mother and regretful daughter score points off each other, the rehearsal establishes a rhythm: fluent, witty exchanges of scripted dialogue, punctuated by two kinds of interruption. The accidental halts come when lines are muffed or prompts required. The intentional breaks come when Hall or one of the actresses interjects, perhaps to discuss how a line marks 'a new beat' in the scene, or how the delivery of a particular phrase can take fuller account of what will happen later in the play. When Julie, recalling her mother's interference when Gil first wooed her, tells Fanny: 'What a demon you were!', Hall asks Walter 'to make that 'demon' slightly more dangerous', because the word says so much about this mother-daughter relationship.

It is like watching a masterclass. Hall, Dench and Walter share more than 100 years' worth of stage experience, and their collective instincts and attention to detail bring about slight shifts in timing, intonation and gesture which exploit the space between the lines, and the feelings concealed behind them. The impact on Dench and Walter's performances is so marked that if you could somehow have placed the Fanny/Julie scene on a pair of scales at 10am, and again at 10.40am, its comic and emotional weight would have increased by perhaps a third.

Later in the morning, Hall switches from the nuances of this tete-a-tete to the frantic toing and froing that greets Tony Cavendish's unexpected arrival at the apartment. Tony's entrance involves eight characters, including three servants and Fanny's brother and sister-in-law (played by Peter Bowles and Julia McKenzie), some laden with suitcases and all blurting out confused enquiries at top speed. The director's paramount concerns are therefore the 'mechanics': who's standing where; how clearly can the audience see and hear them; how much time do they need to move from A to B and back again. Hall allows his actors considerable freedom to swap places until they feel comfortable, and after six runs of the scene is finally satisfied with the blend of energy and clarity.

Rehearsals end at 3.30 pm and Hall declares himself reasonably pleased: 'They can get right through the play with fair expertise, but it's not anything like finished.' The afternoon run-through of Act One, for example, lasted 47 minutes, and Hall knows that it must be 'much, much quicker' by opening night. 'I'll want Act One down to about 41 minutes,' he says, 'then hope to put five minutes back in for the laughs.'

Thanks to Stephanie Flaherty for sending this article which appeared in the London Evening Standard on October 25, 2001 and to Mike Kennedy for sending me the photo of Peter Hall.

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