It all depends on what you make of the master, as Mountbatten christened Noël Coward — or maybe it was John Mills, depending whom you believe. Superficially silk-thin and brittle, but concealing real depth, sophistication and insight — or just superficial? And are his earlier comedies, in which much of the laughter arises from the characters’ immature self-delusion and emotional self-indulgence, not in themselves frightfully grown-up and emotionally mature? Or are they just daft, dated and cold? In which case, why are talents such as Simon Callow, Judi Dench and Peter Hall going to great efforts to reheat them? Both Present Laughter, which opened in Bath and is now touring to Birmingham and Richmond, and Hay Fever, which is currently pulling packed houses in the West End, are plays about actors, which is enough to make some people run a mile for a start. The protagonist of Present Laughter (1939) is Garry Essendine, something of a Coward self-portrait, apart from his vigorous heterosexuality: a vain, fading, put-upon star plagued simultaneously by ex-wife, mistress, the young girl he seduced last night and the appalling Roland Maule, an earnest young playwright.

The part of Essendine fits Simon Callow to perfection, all staginess and fruity pomposity, while Robin Pearce is hilarious as Maule. With his manic, humourless laugh and huge, flappy white hands — accentuated by his too-small, Mr Bean-style tweed jacket — he comes across at first like a comic but interesting prototype of an angry young man: John Osborne or Alan Sillitoe having accidentally stumbled into this chichi Chelsea studio flat, circa 1939. Maule castigates Essendine for his type of theatre, demanding something more rigorous and intellectual, and it seems for a while as if the bellicose Maule is going to give this pleasing but aimless comedy a good kick up its broad, silk-dressing-gowned bottom. No such luck. Essendine-Coward instead delivers an embarrassingly self-laudatory lecture to Maule on the brilliance, wit and profundity of his type of theatre, and Maule is reduced to adoring acolyte in a trice — a young man literally down on his knees before the preening master. Callow is a lot of fun as a portly, nimble, comically outraged Essendine, and Paul Farnsworth’s art deco set is particularly gorgeous, but it’s this outstandingly squirmy moment that stays with you. “Embarrassing” hardly does justice to it.

Hay Fever (1925), which Robert Hewison reviewed here last week, is even more brittle and self- satisfied. Coward wrote the play at the age of 25, during a single weekend sitting in his mother’s garden. It is still a staple of comfortable MOR theatre, offering an epitome of vanished Englishness to American tourists. The play is dominated by Judith Bliss (Judi Dench), as vain and ludicrous as Garry Essendine, and the mother of what, for its time, rather daringly, was a boho and bad-mannered family. They sometimes say “damn”, they argue a lot and they don’t introduce their guests properly. But since they are not actually abusing controlled substances or each other, this hardly counts as shocking today. Characters have to deliver lines such as “Myra, don’t be so statuesque” and sound vaguely real, which can’t be done.

Dench is wonderfully cross and energetic as Judith. But her funniest moment, tellingly, comes not from one of Coward’s lines, but an invention of her own, a moment of pure physical comedy when she skips across the stage to pluck a flower “winsomely”. Sheer delight, but sadly it only high- lights the feebleness of the play — even when directed by Peter Hall, as here.

I wanted Roland Maule to invade and cause chaos amid all this frothy farce; or Jimmy Porter; or even Trainspotting’s Begbie. Now that would be fun.

Coward’s best work was done during the war: This Happy Breed and In Which We Serve suggest that what really stirred his heartstrings was patriotism. There is also Brief Encounter, of course, where you can still hear the suppressed emotion. At least there’s emotion there to be suppressed.

The title, Present Laughter, only reminded me of the song in Twelfth Night from which it comes. There is more feeling, and food for thought, in those six lines than in the whole Coward corpus. “What is love? ’Tis not hereafter; present mirth hath present laughter; what’s to come is still unsure. In delay there lies no plenty; then come kiss me, sweet and twenty; youth’s a stuff will not endure.”

Present Laughter, Three stars, Theatre Royal Bath; touring to Birmingham, May 8-27,