One night the RSC revives Schiller's Don Carlos, which invokes Shakespearean tragedy: the next night TS Eliot's The Family Reunion, which feeds off Greek tragedy. But where Schiller offers living, pulsating drama, Eliot's play, for all the skill of Adrian Noble's production, feels like a strenuous act of exhumation.
First seen in 1939, The Family Reunion grafts the Oresteia on to a country house drama. The hero, Harry Lord Monchensey, returns to his north country family home pursued by Furies: the external manifestation of his guilt over the death of his wife at sea. But Harry discovers the house is cursed by an earlier ancestral crime: his father's wish to murder his wife before Harry himself was born. At which point, the Furies turn into the kindly Eumenides and Harry is free to expiate past sins.
Eliot himself thought the play's problem lay in the staging of the Furies: either, he said, they look like a still out of a Walt Disney film or they swarm across the stage like a football team. But the real problem lies elsewhere. You can't simply impose classic myths on West End family drama: Aeschylus into Dodie Smith won't go.
If the play has any claim on us today, it is as a revelation of Eliot's own private guilt. The play's composition coincided with the committal of Eliot's first wife, Vivien, to a mental hospital. And it is impossible not to hear in Harry's self-hatred, in his vivid apprehension of "the unspoken voice of sorrow in the ancient bedroom" and in the family's fear of the newspapers, something of Eliot's own inner demons.
Any director has his work cut out to make the piece live on stage. Noble partly succeeds by treating Harry's numerous uncles and aunts as comic thirties relics. He and his designer, Rob Howell, also solve the problem of the Furies by presenting them as masked figures in Homburg hats and black coats glimpsed through a misty, tilted window.
But the evening's chief pleasure lies in the performance by Greg Hicks as Harry. Rarely have I heard an actor so skilfully give formal verse a conversational rhythm by the simple expedient of emphasising the key word in each line. But Hicks not only speaks the verse perfectly: he suggests that Harry is genuinely possessed by demons and yet yearning for release. If a dry, neo-classical play is theatrically redeemed, it is largely thanks to his performance.
