WITH FINE comedies such as Noises Off and Over the Moon running in the West End, we aren’t lacking in funny plays about temperamental actors. But you would have to look a long way to find a better cast than the one adorning this latest production of George Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s The Royal Family. Emily Blunt plus Judi Dench plus Peter Bowles plus Toby Stephens plus Julia Mackenzie plus Harriet Walter adds up to an irresistibly classy comic brew.
And that is as it should be, for this play is about the classiest of American acting dynasties, the Barrymores. True, they are renamed the Cavendishes, but in the New York of the Twenties, nobody was fooled, least of all the glamorous Ethel Barrymore. She was enraged by the portrait of her brother John, who appeared as the gifted hellraiser that he was, and even more so by the slur on the family as a whole. “The legend has it that we artists are wild, careless, tousled and immoral,” she wrote. “We live en famille, and such a famille!”
The authors added insult to injury by asking Ethel to play herself, and she sued Kaufman and Ferber. So, jokily, did the Marx Brothers, whose own spoof of the Barrymores was already famous. The suit collapsed and the play became a tremendous success. But it always rankled with Ethel. Years later, Kaufman asked her to do a benefit performance. “I plan on having laryngitis that day,” she replied.