When David Hare’s Amy’s View was first staged in 1997, most reviewers liked the play but all of them wrote the critical counterpart of love-notes to Judi Dench, who was the robust, assertive West End thespian at the evening’s centre. Could Felicity Kendal do half as much justice to maybe the liveliest of all the lively woman characters Hare has created?

Well, yes, and much more. Those who still think of Kendal as the pert chipmunk of yesteryear will be as surprised by her strong, doughty performance as they must have been when she recently played Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days and had to spend the evening gamely defying the awfulness of life from inside a pile of sand. At the age of 60 — sorry, Felicity, to give away the secret — she’s acquired the depth and, where needed, the gravity that seemed missing in her cuter, more winsome days.

But how has the play itself fared? As Peter Hall’s revival proves, not at all badly. Hare still takes on almost too many subjects — the value of theatre, the decay of England, mothers and daughters, the tension between in-laws, loss, grief, money and the cleansing of the soul — but none of these has dated much since 1997. Only when Kendal’s Esme Allen is put permanently into debt by the collapse of the Lloyd’s syndicate to which she belongs does one feel one is watching yesterday’s news.

Esme’s daughter is the Amy of the title and her “view” is that people should love and forgive each other. And as played by an intense young Jenna Russell she is indeed an attractive enough character. But she’s a lot less central and her view rather less evident than that title suggests. Kendal’s Esme always matters more and her battling relationship with Ryan Kiggell’s Dominic, who impregnates, marries and then dumps Amy is Hare’s prime focus.

In many ways, then, Amy’s View is a well-written mother-in-law play. But, Hare being Hare, Esme and Dominic’s cultural attitudes largely cause and shape their mutual dislike. Dominic despises the theatre as elitist, arty-farty and, compared to the electronic arts, embarrassingly old-fashioned and dull. And he proceeds to become slickly successful, first as the presenter of demotic programmes in which cartoon characters flush supposedly pretentious plays and books down the loo, then as a British Tarantino with a knack for taking cool shots of bursting skulls.

As in 1997, I felt that he was too obviously the repository of all that Hare finds crass in an increasingly philistine Britain; but, more than in 1997, I saw that his war with Esme isn’t wholly uneven. When the actress grandly opens the local fête or dismisses the telly world with a superior shrug or offhandedly spends money she doesn’t have on long taxi rides she doesn’t need, she does sometimes seem the modern equivalent of the overbearing, arrogant diva of Coward’s Hay Fever. Dominic’s rasping denunciations of her affectations and pretences aren’t wholly without substance.

But the play’s ending makes Hare’s true feelings clear. Amy is dead and Esme, who had been forced onto the telly by her debts, is acting in what seems to be a raw but talented play in the place that really matters, the theatre. As she makes up before her mirror, chats to an aspiring young actor, receives a chastened Dominic and goes onstage, she’s a different woman: pale, sober, chastened, regenerate.

That scene is played beautifully, but then all Sir Peter’s cast do their bit: from Kiggell, who brings aggro and punch to Dominic, to Gawn Grainger, who is gloriously flummoxed as Frank, the “name” who introduced Esme to Lloyd’s yet sees no reason why they shouldn’t get married. But it’s Kendal who gives the lie to those who underrated her. At the end she’s quietly, movingly heroic.

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