Theatre is gambling. You put on a fringe show with two little-known Irish actors, and it arrives in the West End and runs there for years. (Stones in his Pockets). You put an all-star British cast including Judi Dench into the beautiful Theatre Royal Haymarket in an interesting old Broadway comedy at just the moment when the theatre-going public is said to be longing for comedy; advance box-office is said to be nearing six figures before even the first preview; and and the result is nothing much.

I speak of The Royal Family. Most of the cast are such artists and so talented that the professional in me wants to see how this show will be in a month's time or so. But the amateur in me cannot at present recommend it to anyone.

The most intrusive things are the trivial: the hats, the frocks, and, above all, the accents. The Royal Family is about three generations of a grand New York theatre family, at home, but the designer Anthony Ward, whose set alone shows that he is determined to be the prima ballerina of this production, has put Judi Dench, Harriet Walter, Julia McKenzie, and Emily Blunt into period costumes that are vilely unflattering and look irritatingly uncomfortable.

When you can get past how they look, then there is the problem of how they sound. True, few accents are harder to define today than the Received Pronunciation of 1920s Broadway folk, but the five members of one family here don't even sound related to each other. Dench (who has not, I think, ever tried an American accent before) hardly bothers, but she bothers now and then, just enough to let everybody know that she can't do one. By contrast, Harriet Walter, playing her daughter Julie, works so hard at sounding American that, in another production, she'd pass. But Dench, Peter Bowles, and Philip Voss have already scuppered the show with un-American acts before Walter, who actually has its central role, first enters.

If you can get through all that, and if you can get through the fact that Peter Hall, directing, has not managed to balance the play's subtle mix of offstage farce and tender life-in-the-theatre comedy, there are truly marvellous things here. Dench, though at present her performance falls into a series of Great Highlights, is still so superb an actor that those highlights truly are great. As the elderly widowed star matriarch of a great acting clan, she has the play's most grandly authoritative moments. This great actor hasn't mastered all this role, but you can see why she's tackling it: it genuinely extends her to find new aspects of herself.

But it's misleading to bill La Dench, for all her stardom, above the rest of the cast: you expect her to have a more crucial role than she has. Correctly, she and Walter take the final bows together, and Walter's stylish accomplishment is invaluable throughout, even if she never seems to relax within it to have or to give fun. The funniest and most stylish performance is from Toby Stephens, at his best and very Barrymore indeed as her tornado movie-star brother Tony, and the best performance - in the dullest role - is from Robert Petkoff (who is American anyway, so has a head start) as the young financier marrying into the family. Joy Richardson, as the maid Della, manages to create a great deal of comedy single-handed. Julia McKenzie is fine but wasted as a shrewish sister-in-law.

There are certain factors here which even a theatre gambler could have predicted beforehand. Dench's un-American accent is one. The predictable, limited, and inadequate performance of Peter Bowles is another. The whole production is one of those many embarrassing Peter Hall concoctions where the cook has let his ingredients spoil each other. Several less prestigious directors could have done this tricky job better, and this too could have been predicted.

Thanks to Stephanie Flaherty for sending this review which appeared in the Financial Times (UK) on November 5, 2001.

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