The Donmar launches its T S Eliot season by reminding us what a magical, entrancing experience The Family Reunion can be, even in an emotionally under-powered production such as this by Jeremy Herrin. The play’s spectral potency means more to us than to bemused audiences at its 1939 premiere. Eliot springs surprise upon surprise by exploiting the stylistic elements of an Agatha Christie detective drama while rooting his Thirties anti-hero, Harry, in the ominous world of Aeschylus’s Oresteia: Eliot’s supernatural Furies here become Dream Figures, haunting a man on the run from his nagging conscience.

Eliot conceives his Family Reunion as if it belonged to the drawing room thriller genre, in which respectable aristocrats, who changed for dinner into long dresses and frock-coats, who summoned maids to draw curtains, find themselves caught up in murder and madness in a grand country house. Samuel West’s agitated heir unapparent, Harry ­— a lord no less, though the proletarian programme doesn’t mention the fact — comes home after eight years, sounding more than a little disturbed and confessing to having pushed his wife over the rails of the cruise liner on which they were having an unlovely holiday. So the family doctor is summoned at once and a police sergeant rather than an inspector calls, both these characters subjected to caricature. Gemma Jones, ridiculously leaning on a stick, gruffly quavering in an artificial voice as tremulously unreal as her wig, plays Harry’s unhappy mother to the manner unborn.

There are, though, far less to these Christie-like trappings than meets the jaded eye. The gloom of Bunnie Christie’s settings (no relation of Agatha), all brown panels and dust-covered chairs is intensified by Nick Powell’s spooky music, its chiming clocks and echoes. Characters speak in blank verse, elevated in flights of paradox, memory and yearning.

When the lights are dimmed, a troupe of desiccated uncles and aunts, whom Eliot renders in shades of delicious comedy, serve as a variant on the classic Greek chorus, unable to fathom what’s going on. William Gaunt’s delectable Charles Piper, who puts youth’s decadence down to too many cocktails and cigarettes, Una Stubbs’s simpering Ivy in furrows of curls, Paul Shelley’s drawling Gerald and Anna Carteret’s Lady Bracknellish Violet represent high society at its down-to -earth, most simple. White
light shines down on Penelope Wilton’s Aunt Agatha and Hattie Morahan’s listless Mary, the play’s two illuminators.

Seen through a glass darkly, in the light of recent revelations about the playwright’s callous treatment of his first, disturbed wife and his early, gay longings, West’s Eliot-like Harry goes through a form of expiation, but too often appears glacially perplexed rather than tormented. Only when the Furies, whose fearful form has been brilliantly reinvented by Herrin as childhood revenants, rise up before him does he lose his cool to useful effect. Miss Wilton’s spell-binding performance as the voluptuous, anguished Aunt Agatha, opens the door to the family’s secret and so liberates Harry from the family’s curse. She alone takes The Family Reunion to its thrilling, high plane of metaphysical mystery.

Until 10 January, box office; 0871 297 5458, www.donmarwarehouse.com