The Royal Family (Haymarket) is a seriously sophisticated American comedy (1927) by George S Kaufman and Edna Ferber about the Cavendishes, a great theatrical dynasty based on the Barrymores. The play is set in their grand New York mansion, and Anthony Ward has created another of his breath- taking facts: a stunning interior whose owners are clearly in the process of moving from glittering art nouveau to cool art deco without an intervening period of Bauhaus. The costumes have the same brilliant mix, suggesting a group of superbly plumed predators who don't much fancy the look of their prey, but will eat and destroy them anyway.
The first thing you notice when the curtain rises is a stupendous staircase curving up and back: you know at once that people will descend on it in some style. And they do; and none with more haughty glamour than Fanny Cavendish, the matriarch of the clan (Judi Dench). Fanny rules her family with an iron jaw. Under her steely exterior their beats a granite heart; and her putdowns, cold, hard, precise and pointed, crash into her victims like the famous ice pick into poor Trotsky's skull.
Dench returns to the London theatre like an empress after a long tour of her dominions, to whom it never occurred that anyone would have even approached her throne. Nor have they. The point about her performance is that she is not playing the star part. There is no star part. This is a group portrait in which every figure is equally important. It is simply that she creates a towering character through sheer force of personality and an utterly assured and flawless technique, but without ever upstaging anybody. This is true star quality. Today you can, alas, no names, no pack drill, be a star without it - but that is another story.
Others descending the staircase are Fanny's daughter Julie (Harriet Walter), sleekest of predators; her brother, the ghastly, swashbuckling Tony (Toby Stephens), like Errol Flynn on speed; and her daughter, headstrong, stage-struck Gwen (Emily Blunt). Gwen is considering rebellion and marriage to nice, clean Perry (Robert Petkoff) and Julie is still being courted by the platinum millionaire Gilbert (a silkily understated performance from Peter Blythe). A ham-actor couple from hell (Peter Bowles, Julia McKenzie) hover aggressively, looking grand and offended. The atmosphere is febrile, obsessional and conspiratorial, like being with people who are interested only in the Stock Exchange, socialism or dog racing. Theatre or life - which will win? Can there be one without the other, given that the latter must feed and nurse the former?
Peter Hall directs a superb piece of ensemble acting: headlong speed is combined with cunningly articulated pace, and the crescendos of the family rows are masterpieces of orchestration. Tony, on the run from women, returns from Germany having dis-covered a suprematist Passion Play. Hall turns this into Brecht's Threepenny Opera, which is a nice touch except that it opened a year after Kaufman's play, and Flashy Tony would hardly have liked it.
Oh yes, and the grand portrait of Aubrey Cavendish, father of the clan, is a copy of the famous Boldoni portrait (1897) of Comte Robert de Montesquiou, on whom Proust based Charles Swann, and it is looking the wrong way. So there. But frankly, I don't care, and neither should you.
This review which appeared in the Sunday Times on November 4, 2001.Return