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One, in a discussion between fathers, suggests that "boy babies cry more than girl babies". The night before we meet, Stephens's own first boy baby, Eli, had been born to his wife, the actress Anna-Louise Plowman. Pinter is right about the crying, he reports. It had been a long night: after Eli's birth, Stephens's mother, Maggie Smith, came round to celebrate after her performance in Edward Albee's The Lady of Dubuque.

But other lines in the play will carry a more painful personal resonance, for both Stephens and Smith. At one point, Jerry has a drunken lunch with his publisher friend Robert, to be played in the new Donmar Warehouse production by Samuel West. As Jerry knocks back whisky, he explains that he's recovering from a virus. "And the only thing to get rid of this bug was Scotch - at lunchtime as well as night. So I'm still drinking Scotch at lunchtime in case it comes back."

Comic self-delusion over alcohol consumption - especially in conversation with someone called Robert - must inevitably conjure up ghosts for the son of Robert Stephens, a striking stage actor who dissipated his talent through the drink addiction that killed him. But for Toby - who, at 38, presents the startling collage of Maggie Smith's face on Robert Stephens's body - the boozy lunches in Betrayal will be a double double-take. I ask him whether, as well as inheriting his parent's looks and talents, he fears the presence of his father's self-destructive genes.

He sighs, pauses and false-starts twice before answering: "I think I've dealt with it. It's one of those things. I had his alcoholism. I have it. Luckily, I got out of it by the time I was 30. I'd watched Robert die from it but, stupidly, carried on drinking. I wish I could say it was some kind of psychological torture. But it's purely a physical need. I am designed to cope with huge quantities of alcohol and to want more. As soon as I have some, I want more. And my life is just much easier not having any, although I miss it sometimes."

The crisis came around the turn of the millennium. His distress at the death of his stepfather - the writer Beverley Cross, who Smith had married after divorce from Robert Stephens - triggered a long period of 24-hour benders. Although outwardly a successful actor - in The Camomile Lawn on television and A Streetcar Named Desire on stage - he was beginning to forget lines and, bloated by litres of sugary liquids, led the New York Times reviewer of a New York production of Phedre to write: "The Hippolytus needs to get on a Stairmaster."

While in Manhattan, Stephens turned up to audition for a revival of Anouilh's Ring Around the Moon, having spent the night in bars. He was so pissed he couldn't focus on the script but luckily a sympathetic director suggested he reschedule. Temporarily sober, he got the role, but realised he was going to "crash and burn" if this went on. On the plane going to rehearsals, he bought the habitual bottle of vodka but placed it unopened in the fridge of his Manhattan lodgings and pledged not to drink for a month. After two sick, sweaty weeks, in which he "fooled myself that I had flu", he was shocked to find how well he felt. In this period, he met Anna-Louise and has not drunk since. His most high-profile roles - Hamlet for the RSC, the baddie Gustave Graves in the Bond film Die Another Day - have come in the dry years.

Stephens's experience has left him intolerant of the acting profession's easy acceptance of drinking. "This whole romantic myth of Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton gliding through Hamlet on two bottles of vodka. I'm sorry, but it doesn't work. How fucking marvellous would they have been without it?"

Had his mother said anything during his years of self-destruction? "I think she may have guessed. She'd been through it all with Robert. I've talked to her about it since and she's been incredibly supportive."

Smith, though, has a reputation for quick but cruel humour, claiming whole pages in dictionaries of theatrical quotations. When Toby appeared naked in Coriolanus, for example, Smith almost stole the show by commenting loudly in the interval that she hadn't seen his willy since he was five. Was her mothering as verbally colourful?

"She can be tricky," he admits. "She's a very bright, very strong person. By and large, she gets away with it in the profession, because people know she's as hard on herself as anyone else. If she didn't deliver, people would be like, 'Do you mind?' But she can be ... I grew up around it. It's incredibly entertaining and sometimes quite nasty to be on the end of it. You just have to appreciate the wit behind it. I remember when she started to do it with my wife and my wife said, 'She was really rude to me.' And I said, 'Welcome to the family, you've been embraced into the bosom.'"

Children like the people in their lives to retain constant personalities. So was it difficult being the offspring of actors, whose job is shifting shape on stage?

"I find it easier now," says Stephens. "I'm as objective as I'll ever be and can appreciate what mum is doing. I can look with technical admiration at how she does something, like going from a big laugh to deep pain in a moment. But, when I was young, it was embarrassing, to be honest. She'd walk on and I'd be like, 'Oh God, what's she doing? Why's she dressed like that? And, oh God, she's got to kiss that man.' I mean, I remember going to see Oedipus. And that completely fucked my head up."

Given parents and a stepfather who were all involved in theatre, Stephens's profession might seem inevitable. But he remembers that the keys to the family business were not handed over easily: "They tried quite hard to make sure it was what I wanted to do. It wasn't, 'Oh great, he's going into the biz as well.' It was more, 'If this really is what you want to do, why? How many plays have you actually seen?"

Betrayal is a play that Stephens has never seen, although he read it at drama school. It was first staged in 1978, with the original script dating the scenes between 1977 and 1968, and Roger Michell's revival will obey this time-scale. Certain details - a speech about adulterers nipping out to pay-phones, a man boasting about slapping a woman - are so alien to modern culture that, says Stephens, "it can only be played as a period piece, although it won't be a total design thing, with everyone in flares."

One aspect of the script, however, may be changed: the carefully specified pauses, which Pinter has come to regret making his trademark: "We had lunch with him before rehearsals and he came to hear an early readthrough. I said: 'Do you want me to adhere to dot dot dot and so on?' And he said: 'Ignore all that, whenever I do my plays, I ignore all that.' The pauses are there really as hints or advice for actors. And some of the pauses really work, it's orchestrated like music. But others you find in the playing you don't need."

Three years have elapsed between his Hamlet and this play. There have been films and a Rochester in BBC1's Jane Eyre and a long sabbatical in New Zealand, which, I suggest, indicates some pickiness or disillusionment with the business.

"Yeah. The longer I'm in this job, the more I realise how lucky I am because it's getting harder. It just seems to be diminishing. There seem to be no films at all and, in theatre, it's harder and harder to get audiences in."

Some of the audiences coming to the Donmar will be drawn from the millions who saw Die Another Day. Before Daniel Craig was given the cinematic licence to kill, Stephens was listed in some newspapers as a possible Bond; he would have become the first actor to have played both 007 and a villain in the series.

"I don't know where that came from," he laughs. "I mean, Christ, there was enough fuss about [Craig] being blond. Can you imagine if they'd given it to a ginger? There'd be assassination plots."

· Betrayal is in preview at the Donmar Warehouse, London WC2, and opens on June 5 (2007).