The Family Reunion
THERE is an idea that you have to be frightfully clever to understand TS Eliot.
He is certainly a challenge but The Family Reunion, his rarely performed 1939 play, wields a tremendous haunted power which is exploited to its maximum in Jeremy Herrin's menacing new production.
As the drama unfolds, the audience may feel (I certainly did) that they are grasping to understand Eliot's more opaque characters: however, the many layers of terror are undeniable.
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What unfolds is Agatha Christie meets Greek tragedy while looking ahead to Harold Pinter, as Eliot's central character Harry returns to his ancestral home after a seven-year absence to celebrate his mother's birthday.
Expect lashings of melodrama, down to the eerie lighting and the phantom of Harry's dead wife in a "ghost of Banquo" style appearance.
The set is a faded, wood-panelled drawing room in an aristocratic country house where a mounting pile of dust evokes the sands of time and suggests the whole family, young and old, are living out their last gasps of breath.
Family skeletons and dark secrets are unearthed but, if the play initially resembles a classic whodunnit, the mystery becomes less "has Harry killed his late wife?" and more "will he be able to comprehend man's purgatorial struggle through life to redemption?"
As Harry, Samuel West has the right level of psychological torment mixed with disdain for his family's banalities. In fact the entire all-star cast, which includes Una Stubbs, Penelope Wilton and William Gaunt are first-class.
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Gemma Jones in particular brims with disappointment and quakes with barely concealed rage as the matriarch Amy.
Expect lashings of melodrama, down to the eerie lighting and the phantom of Harry's dead wife in a "ghost of Banquo" style appearance.
The Furies, the avenging trio of Greek tragedy who pursue Harry, are here pale spectres of his childhood self, young boys with sallow eyes wearing long shorts and wielding butterfly nets.
Some may view this admittedly intimidating verse play as a stagey period piece but the terrors that are communicated, from a fear of stagnation to intangible anxieties ("the noises in the cellar", "the paw under the door") still resonate and the production is certainly a worthy revival, if only to shock a new audience with the disturbing force of Eliot's poetry.
OUR VERDICT: 4/5
Donmar Warehouse, London, 0870 060 6624, until January 17
