This was the piece that back in 1924 made Noël Coward’s name as an actor as well as a dramatist, since he played his own leading character, the neurotic coke addict Nicky Lancaster.

Then The Vortex was seen partly as a attack on a rackety postwar world, partly as the half-disguised confession of an author who, as he wryly said later, was himself taken for “a weedy sensualist in the last stages of physical and moral degeneration”. Now it seems worth reviving mainly for the last of its three acts: an updating of the closet scene in Hamlet, with an anguished Nicky berating his mother for committing serial adultery and, even worse, neglecting him.

All else in the play – Florence Lancaster’s faltering affair with a man half her age, her son’s unravelling engagement to a girl who cares for him as little as he cares for her – is barely more than a means to this climactic end. And, yes, the scene does come to life in 2008, thanks mainly to the actress who plays the mother in Peter Hall’s revival: Felicity Kendal, whom one would call evergreen if she didn’t so honestly embody a woman losing her leaves, her looks and her lovers.

Let’s alter the metaphor and say that one of the pleasures of recent years has been to watch this appealing actress shedding her cute-chipmunk or sweet-squirrel image. She did that in Beckett’s Happy Days and a revival of David Hare’s Amy’s View and she’s continuing the process here. I don’t think I’ve seen a Gertrude look as ashen and sound as blasted after her lambasting by Hamlet as Kendal’s Florence does after Dan Stevens’s Nicky has accused her of selfishness, frivolity and a failure to be adequately maternal.

But here’s what’s wrong as well as right with the play.

Technically, it’s a remarkably mature piece, but emotionally it’s awfully immature. Should we be sympathising with Nicky, who at 24 is the same age as Coward was in 1924, when he says “you’re going to be my mother for once, it’s time I had one before I go over the edge altogether”? That’s pretty infantile.

And can we believe that narcissistic Florence has the character to “save” her son – or, indeed, do anything but turn from an ageing flapper into a senile flapper, batting her eyes at the medics from her life-support machine?

Still, Hall’s revival has the strengths we expect of him: clarity, fluency and a refusal to let characters veer into caricature. Barry Stanton, playing Florence’s gay friend, rejects the implicit invitation to camp it up. Daniel Pirrie, Florence’s current lover, is bored and shallow but not the obviously arrogant stud he might be. And Stevens begins by underplaying Nicky so much you’re left wondering why he’s variously called temperamental, effeminate, hysterical and a debauched wreck.

But he rises to the last-act challenges almost as fully as Kendal, who until then has refused to trill, flounce or over-emphasise her credentials as the spoilt darling of the cocktail circuit. He sobs, shakes her, hurls her make-up across the bedroom and, you feel, would skewer Polonius if he were lurking behind the curtains. She begins the scene with a show of frozen defiance, but by its end is beaten, broken, humiliated, old. The play may be uneven, but Kendal’s performance decidedly isn’t.

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