The Family Reunion, Donmar Warehouse, London

One of T S Eliot's best critics, Helen Gardner, stated that The Family Reunion was more effective when seen than when read, and Jeremy Herrin's highly charged and grimly atmospheric revival at the Donmar Warehouse certainly bears her out. Part mystical mystery tour, part country house thriller, sorrow seeps under the lintels as Harry Monchesney, heir to Wishwood, comes home, pursued by Furies.

If that sounds all Greek to you, then it is. Harry is a modern Orestes who fled the house where sin lay heavy on his heart eight years ago. But whose sin exactly? It emerges that his now dead father wanted to murder his pregnant wife, Amy, the Lady Monchesney, Harry's mother, in order to marry her sister, Agatha. Harry's own wife has died at sea, falling overboard in the Mediterranean. Is Harry to blame? His two brothers, who never arrive for dinner, have both had accidents.

In self-consciously raising the tone of the West End comedy by writing in a strangely expressive verse form of, as he put it, "a line of varying length and varying number of syllables, with a caesura and three stresses," Eliot was also highlighting the murkiness of banality and the sudden jolt of mortality.

This causes an uneasy sense of artificiality in an audience, so that Kenneth Tynan – who admittedly had other fish to fry at the time – described the play in 1956 (Peter Brook directing Paul Scofield as Harry) as a "has-been, would-be masterpiece".

Seventy years after its premiere, the mists of battle over what modern drama should be "about" have evaporated to reveal a haunting play of family ghosts and broken dreams, even if one or two sequences remain annoyingly opaque. Herrin's production begins with a clanging of time-pieces – start all the clocks! – and the actors assemble in a vast brown panelled room, an antechamber of death (designed by Bunny Christie) falling into disrepair.

This is hardly the merry atmosphere we expect for a homecoming, not to mention a birthday party. Harold Pinter took a couple of cues here. The birthday is Amy's. The sad old matriarch is played with red-eyed, tragic grandeur by Gemma Jones. Samuel West's insistently self-dramatising Harry may have all the best arguments about the trouble we're in – he's living the nightmare – but Jones's Amy becomes the still, throbbing centre of tragic deprivation. First her husband, now her son; she blames Agatha for everything.

Having just picked up one of the Donmar's three Evening Standard awards, Penelope Wilton returns in triumph as Agatha, the acid-natured academic who has spent 30 years in a women's college trying not to dislike women. She stares into the middle distance a lot, thus stifling any giggles even when she utters gnomic nonsense on the activity of otters and weasels, or declares that knots shall be unknotted and crosses uncrossed.

Most theatre-goers will submit to such po-faced pomposity, and to the chorus of aunts and uncles who break up their chatter with wise commentary delivered in unison for the most part, and as a fugue towards the end. Herrin's production and Rick Fisher's lighting excels at these moments. We may indeed now understand the sideways look that brings death into the heart of a child.

Eliot thought his play "defective" on two counts: Harry's an insufferable prig and the chorus doesn't work. West overcomes the first problem in the intensity of his neurosis, while the chorus – Una Stubbs, Anna Carteret, Paul Shelley and William Gaunt – are doubly effective when retreating into the spotlight from their own amusingly stereotyped personalities.

The play's secret, unfulfilled love affair, between Harry and his cousin Mary (Hattie Morahan) becomes a key to unlock the garden of childhood, and the looming Furies, variously played in the past by silhouetted figures in stocking masks, or Ku Klux Klan monsters, are stunningly reimagined as a trio of identical children, with Harry's dead wife, about whom nothing good or affectionate is ever stated, lurching like a blasted, ghostly good-time girl around the windows and the dining table: a brilliant, breath-taking idea.

To 10 January (0870 060 6624; www.donmarwarehouse.com)