The Royal Family, Theatre Royal, Haymarket

Flamboyant all-star revival but the wit is thinly spread

The West End is currently awash with actors performing in plays about actors and the ratio of thespians to civilians now gets even more skewed, as the director Peter Hall tips a whole clan of luvvies into the balance with The Royal Family.

Despite the title, this play is not be confused with the home life of our own dear Queen. It is an American acting dynasty, the Barrymores (in their day, the Kennedys of the legitimate stage) who are affectionately sent up in Kaufman and Ferber's 1927 drama.

"May God strike me dead if I ever appear in an all-star revival," declares Judi Dench as Fanny Cavendish, the formidable matriarch who, despite failing health, is planning a big comeback. It provokes a delighted groan of laughter from the audience for an all-star revival is precisely what Hall has assembled.

What is on offer is the pleasurable in-joke of watching the English acting aristocracy impersonate the competitive egos and joint dedication of their US counterparts of 80 years ago.

On that level, the evening does not greatly disappoint. A chaotic mix of stagey flamboyance and private funk, Toby Stephens hurtles through life as though it were a movie sword fight, cigarette-holder clamped between perfect teeth, in the role of the fencing, womanising Anthony Cavendish who is on the run from Hollywood and a breach-of-promise suit.

Looking fabulous in the Twenties outfits, Harriet Walter, as Julie, vividly communicates how a thoroughbred actress in her prime may yet have mutinous thoughts of escape into less pressurised world. As their mother, a turbaned Judi Dench withers any blow for freedom with her lethally casual put-downs of "normal" existence – dismissing, say, the daily bouquets of roses sent by Julie's millionaire beau with the remark that they arrive every morning "like the milk". This Volumnia of the American theatre is not prepared to let any of the family try to wriggle out of their dynastic destiny.

But neither the presence of comic actors of the calibre of Julia McKenzie and Peter Bowles nor the somewhat synthetic bustle of Hall's production can disguise the fact that the wit is very thinly spread. And the show becomes suffocatingly incestuous. The attractions of life outside the theatre are systematically travestied because such non-thesps as we're permitted to see are given just enough stage-time to prove that they are thoroughgoing bores. Judged as drama, The Royal Family is too often a right-royal let-down.