If the thought of Christmas makes you grind your teeth, you might find solace of a sort in T. S. Eliot’s sombre verse drama of 1939, described by a chorus of its characters as a “nightmare pantomime”. Mesmeric and sometimes maddening, it draws on classical tragedy to explore existential crisis. And while Eliot’s slow deliberation and dense poetry veer between hypnotic and soporific, Jeremy Herrin’s production is absorbingly atmospheric and acted with such intensity that it conjures a quiet horror.

At chilly Wishwood House a family gathers to celebrate the birthday of the elderly widowed matriarch Amy (an agonisingly brittle, papery-skinned Gemma Jones). But terrors lurk among the sibling antagonisms and the childhood memories: the wife of Amy’s son Harry (Samuel West) recently fell from the deck of an ocean liner and Harry is convinced that he murdered her.

He arrives at Wishwood, a home that feels as cursed as the House of Atreus, pursued by the Eumenides, brilliantly reimagined as a trio of whey-faced boys. These Furies are also embodiments of the young Harry himself. As the night darkens more secrets are disgorged in otherwordly visions and in language that swells and eddies as treacherously as the waters that claimed Harry’s wife.

Herrin’s staging drips menace; clocks tick, shadows loom, candles gutter. There are shattered panes in the high windows of Bunny Christie’s set, exquisitely lit by Rick Fisher, and dust trickles from the ceiling in a fine stream, as if implacably measuring out a life like sand in an hour glass.

West makes Eliot’s tormented, occasionally hectoring Harry rivetingly watchable, showing us not just the suffering man but the bewildered child who never felt quite able to fulfil the expectations of his emotionally exigeant mama. His connection with Penelope Wilton’s wise, darkly powerful Agatha — Amy’s youngest sister, who is revealed to have been involved in her marriage to an unusual and uncomfortable degree — is fraught with dammed-up passion. And West’s face betrays, beneath the pain, a contempt for the trivial concerns of relatives whom he dismisses as incapable of comprehending his plight.

Amid the anguish and the ghostly visitations, though, there is wit, a tinkling socially comic counterpoint to the drama’s broken glass. In particular, Una Stubbs as Harry’s Aunt Ivy is daintily delicious, bemused by the strange events and far less interested in probing their mysteries than in sampling Amy’s birthday cake. The play’s evocation of a world beyond our own is fascinating. It’s worth enduring the longueurs.

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