BACK in 1927 Ethel Barrymore was so upset by The Royal Family, which treated America’s premier acting clan with too much lèse-majesté for her taste, she tried to sue George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber, its uppity authors.

Years later, she was still sore enough to reply to Kaufman’s request to do a charity performance with “I plan on having bronchitis that day”: a line Peter Hall seems inexplicably to have cut from his brisk, entertaining revival.

Well, I’d like to believe that Ethel is now looking down on Harriet Walter, who plays the character based on her, and feeling forgiving.

Walter’s Julie Cavendish is graceful, delicate yet authoritative, a woman who somehow keeps her head while all around are frantically and feverishly losing theirs.

Indeed, Ethel’s unquiet shade must surely be flattered by the quality of Hall’s cast: Judi Dench as Julie’s old-trouper mother, a fresh-faced Emily Blunt as her daughter, Peter Bowles and Julia McKenzie as her uncle and aunt — and Toby Stephens as a more endearingly raffish, less obnoxiously boozy brother than that notorious scallywag John Barrymore.

Certainly, Ethel’s ghost couldn’t object to the overall feel of this revival. The busy, confident Broadway of yesteryear is being genially celebrated, along with the lure of the theatre itself. The point is that the Cavendish family has greasepaint in its veins, and greasepaint is addictive. Husbands and old flames try to lure the women away. A Hollywood scandal sends Stephens’s Tony Cavendish fleeing to Europe. But where they will all end up? You’ve got it.

The plot could be tenser, the stakes a bit higher. The lines could also be wittier and the comedy funnier, given that Kaufman wrote scripts for the Marx Brothers. I wish he and Ferber had introduced us to the demented Polish woman who is sueing Tony for breach of promise, or that self-important English dramatist, St John Throckmorton; but, sadly, they don’t.

Still, I found myself happily chortling at the antics of Stephens in particular, a flamboyant narcissist hardly ever out of his Cyrano costume or character. When this boy-man cries that he’d rather spend ten minutes in Chartres Cathedral than return to acting, you know he’s lying, because the very statement is an act.

But then many of the family seem onstage even when they’re offstage, up to Bowles’s grandiloquent yet subtly insecure Herbert, forever scrounging for new roles and trying to upstage McKenzie’s Kitty, who is somewhat underused as his resentful wife.

The prime exception is Dench’s exquisitely judged Fanny. She’s pale, she’s sick, she’ll soon be meeting the great producer in the sky. But for her the stage isn’t an indulgence or an opportunity to show off.

It’s a deeply serious vocation, which demands an austere commitment and total professionalism and clearly gets it from her. To hear her coolly yet emphatically describe preparing for a performance, or simply declare that acting is “everything: work and play and meat and drink”, is to hear something special: a moving testament to the power of the theatre from Kaufman, Ferber and, dare I say, Dame Judi herself.

Thanks to Mike Kennedy for sending this review which appeared in The Times (UK) on November 2, 2001.

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