A scandal of a personal, social and literary kind is unearthed in Tom and Viv, thanks to the sleuthing of its author, Michael Hastings.

This powerful production by Lindsay Posner, in which Frances O'Connor's astonishingly raw and wracked performance as TS Eliot's first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, carries the play's dramatic and emotional charge, arrives two decades after Tom and Viv's London premiere.

Yet it shows this tragi-comedy of pre-war manners and morals has not lost its high-level impact.

The playwright persuasively restores the reputation of Vivienne, whom Eliot and his literary friends wrote off as a crazy nuisance.

Insistent that Vivienne enjoyed a creative influence upon The Wasteland and, relying on interviews with Vivienne's brother Maurice, Hastings levels a serious accusation: Eliot and his wife's family colluded in Vivienne's committal under the Lunacy Act, that was once in vogue for removing troublesome or "morally insane" women from circulation.

Mistreated for her undiagnosed illness, hormonal imbalance and never mad at all, neglected Vivenne withered in confinement.

Tom and Viv is refracted through the medium of social comedy. In short, sharp, cinematic scenes, which Posner swathes in too much dim lighting, too many black-outs, unatmospheric music and blandly minimal sets, Hastings presents young Eliot as an uneasy American outsider, who mistakes the not very landed, reactionary Haigh-Woods for the English highsociety he wants to join.

Anna Carteret's Rose, a fine, down-market Lady Bracknell who despises Bloomsbury behaviour and infantilises her bright daughter, Vivienne; Benjamin Whitrow transforming Viv's vacuous father into an old buffer running out of steam; and moustachioed Robert Portal, genially radiating stupidity as Maurice, all spark amusement in their bemused culture-clashes with Eliot.

Will Keen, a bit mature to play 26, does not resemble the surprisingly athletic, dapper young thing that Eliot was, but he has the poet's primness and desiccated diction. In his three-piece suit, with umbrella and bowler as tokens of Englishness, he communicates just the right sense of emotion seething below the surface.

O'Connor's extraordinarily pitiful Vivienne, her voice pitched a few decibels above conventionality's level, moves with the looselimbed ease of the chronically uninhibited or volatile.

She moves from exuberance to eccentricity and hysteria in dazzling shifts of tone and intensity. She ends up in the asylum, all icy politeness and pathetic love for the husband who has dispossessed her.