The Crucible

This idyllic venue may be more accustomed to gentle laughter and the melodious strains of musicals than to cries of torment, accusation, terror and defiance. But artistic director Timothy Sheader's decision to open this year's season with Arthur Miller's towering 1952 drama triumphantly pays off. Sheader's production dispenses with some of the play's claustrophobia in favour of an austere spectacle with a flavour of classical tragedy; the escalating menace and the sharp pertinence of the writing are emphatically intact.

The stage, in Jon Bausor's design, is a clapboard housefront laid flat. It economically evokes the way in which public hysteria invades and infects private homes, the innocent cooking pot hung over the fire turned by distorted, febrile perception into a witches' cauldron, a child's doll stuck with the needle used to sew it suddenly a voodoo fetish.

For Miller's plot is, of course, based on the Salem witch trials of 1692, and has famously been seen as a fierce indictment of McCarthyism. Like all great theatre, though, it transcends its origins; in the twenty-first century, its relevance to fundamentalism, social and personal morality, mob mentality and authoritarianism remains startling.

Patrick O'Kane is a virile, long-haired John Proctor, whose bristling defensiveness towards his loyal wife, Elizabeth (Emma Cunniffe) and brutal dismissal of his former lover, volatile teenager Abigail (Emily Taaffe) at first places our sympathies with the women.

But as the scorned, wounded Abigail, boiling with humiliation, spite and the memory of her own parents' murder, sets alight with accusation the bone-dry tinder of repression, rumour and neighbourly resentments, hysteria rages like wildfire through the small community. And in the face of moral absolutism, embodied by Oliver Ford Davies as Deputy Governor Danforth, integrity becomes a matter of life and death.

Sheader surrounds the stage with a silent chorus of white-bonneted village girls who bear warped and sinister witness to proceedings. As the darkness gathers, the imagery is extraordinarily potent - though Sheader and movement director Liam Steel take the motif too far when the girls swarm the stage in neatly choreographed formation, implying more order than seems apt to the hellish chaos into which Salem descends.

But the journey down is gripping, culminating in torture and acts of self-definition and sacrifice that send horrified awe flickering even across the face of Taaffe's vengeful Abigail. A dark and daring bad dream for a midsummer's night.