There's a calm center to Peter Hall's noisy and rather wearing production of "The Royal Family," and her name is Judi Dench. At this point in her singular career, it hardly needs pointing out that Dame Judi's stage instincts are second to none; there's virtually no one who can transfix a house as she does on this occasion merely reciting a theater performer's routine: "Props, cue, enter. That's all that has kept me alive these past few years."

The irony this time around is that it's Dench's witty and elegiac portrait of a fading theatrical grande dame that brings genuine life to a production so overpitched and variably cast that you may find yourself either wincing or stifling a yawn. Unless, of course, Dench's Fanny Cavendish is descending Anthony Ward's elegant 1920s staircase in one or another of Ward's Norma Desmond-like gowns, at which point I can't imagine a theatergoer alive who would want to look -- or be -- anywhere else. (Film watchers, meanwhile, will note the presence as below-the-title exec producers of longtime Dench enthusiasts Bob and Harvey Weinstein, furthering an interest in legit that includes their share of Broadway's "The Producers" as well as the Tony-winning revival of "The Real Thing" two seasons ago.)

Dench hasn't appeared onstage as frequently in the past few years as in times past, and many may wonder why she is devoting her time to an apparent trifle, the George S. Kaufman-Edna Ferber Broadway collaboration from 1927 about a family patterned after the Barrymores. In fact, the production is inconceivable without Dench, not just for the natural style she lends to the piece but for her welcome absence of camp. While the writing more or less encourages the bold brushstroke (Toby Stephens' Errol Flynn-like turn is a ceaseless succession of them), Dench, as always, perceives a greater truth. A family, says Fanny, is "about more than tables and chairs," just as Dench's own skills readily transcend the play they're in.

You want a master class in comedy? Dench provides it, offering up a remark like, "Marriage isn't a career; it's an incident," as if Fanny were a Manhattanite Lady Bracknell. (Indeed, those used to Dench's very Englishness may be momentarily disconcerted to hear that distinctive vocal husk in the service of a vaguely American accent making reference to "some young squirt.") At the same time, no one can induce a comparable hush simply by taking a fellow cast member's hand. "There's no foolishness about you," the Cavendish's manager Oscar Wolfe (Philip Voss, in the ensemble's standout turn) tells Fanny, and he's right: Dench can play an acting legend because she is one, and yet she's forever real as well. I'm not convinced that the rest of the evening will seem terribly real. At heart, the play is what one might call a staircase comedy of a particularly sentimental sort (what is the matriarchal Fanny's fatal illness? We're never told), an exercise in charm and, yes, theatrics that trades in atmosphere rather than plot. (My distant memory is of considerably more allure to the 1976 Broadway revival, with Eva le Gallienne in Dench's role and the inimitable Rosemary Harris as her daughter.)

Such plot as the play possesses pertains to one generation of Cavendish or another being lured away from their natural habitat, the stage. Hyper-gallant son Anthony (a slimmed-down Stephens, who looks great) has found fame in Hollywood, only to come dashing back to the family's East Side duplex before gallivanting off once more to Germany, where -- in a not very credible touch that veers unnecessarily from the original script -- he returns to America raving about "The Threepenny Opera." His enthusiasms lend a bizarre tone to the final scene, rather as if Hall -- in juxtaposing the waning theatrical splendor of the Cavendishes with the ascendance of German Expressionism -- were attempting to turn a rather fragile comedy into "The Cherry Orchard."

Mostly, "The Royal Family's" concerns aren't anywhere near so weighty, except insofar as both Fanny's daughter Julie (Harriet Walter) and granddaughter Gwen (Emily Blunt) find their allegiance to the family vocation tested by men who have come to take them away. "There'll always be a new play, won't there?" reasons Perry (Robert Petkoff), Gwen's intended, feeding Gwen's determination to be a "regular person." Walter, an able actress in other roles, may simply be too straight to play Julie, and it's not helped by her pronouncing words like "cozier" with a Brooklyn accent at odds with someone who is supposed to be Broadway's reigning actress. If the actual dramatic engine of "The Royal Family" is the struggle for Julie's soul -- her paramour is one Gilbert Marshall (Peter Blythe), whose outsider status results in him calling the Cavendishes "you people" -- Walter doesn't convey a diva in crisis: Perhaps she's just too reined-in for a part that needs a flourish of its own -- one can imagine Dench's "Amy's View" co-star Samantha Bond having a high old time in the role.

Hall's cast is unusually starry even by his standards, rounded out by Peter Bowles and Julia McKenzie, the latter excelling in a shockingly small assignment as Fanny's sister-in-law and the victim of the elder woman's more acidic aspersions. It's a shame, then, that lots of shtick and door-slamming have been allowed to prevail, especially since Dench admirably sets the tone that the show as a whole might have followed. Can one be both a Cavendish and human? That's the question posed by a somewhat shopworn play lucky enough to star a great actress whose talents run that much deeper because she's always human, too.

Thanks to Mike Kennedy for sending this review from Variety.com on November 11, 2001.

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