THIS was the play that rehabilitated an unfashionable Noël Coward when Olivier’s National persuaded the dramatist to stage it with Edith Evans and a marvellous supporting cast in 1964. Forty-odd years later it seems as fresh and funny as it was then — or, indeed, as it clearly was at its premiere 40 years earlier. After all, have our haut-bohemian classes got less offhandedly rude and blithely self- absorbed? Have they hell.

Judi Dench now takes the role of Judith Bliss, the ageing actress and drama queen who can’t exist without being the centre or, preferably, epicentre of attention. But then everyone in the Bliss family suffers from her twin ailments. which are narcissism and caprice: Peter Bowles as her novelist husband David, Kim Medcalf and Dan Stevens as their smart, sharp, wayward children, Sorel and Simon. God help those who venture into the cache of egos that is their house in Cookham.

Actually, each of the four Blisses has invited a more conventional person for the weekend, giving the play what Coward rightly called its “quite extraordinarily well constructed” plot. Charles Edwards as a starstruck youth, Belinda Lang as the fading beauty who uses “sex as a shrimping net”, William Chubb as an earnest chap from the FO, Olivia Darnley as an ingenuous flapper: all are successively ignored, snubbed, rejected by the Bliss they know and taken up by a Bliss they don’t, then lured into fake-romantic situations that come with heavy, melodramatic talk of engagement, marriage and divorce.

Could Peter Hall’s revival be a bit subtler at times? Some of my favourite lines went more or less missing. Dame Judi shouldn’t drop the final words that betray her pose as the squire’s lady and show she doesn’t know the view from her own house: “On a fine day you can see as far as Marlow — so they tell me.”

Again, Chubb and Darnley might make more of their hilariously awkward attempt to sustain conversation, this time about Spain. “Nobody who loved horses could enjoy a bullfight.” “Nor anybody who loved bulls.”

Yet hilarity is everywhere: Dench huskily languishing on the chaise longue or girlishly skipping across the stage as she embodies “winsomely” in a game of adverbs; Bowles maintaining matinee-idol decorum as he makes stilted love to a baffled, appalled and finally furious Lang; Medcalf and Stevens exuding a cool disdain that hasn’t dated since the 1920s.

Hay Fever was the young Coward’s amused but ambivalent salute to a world that had abandoned the old manners for a new sophistication — and, yes, it still lives.

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