For any drama, becoming a set text is both a blessing and a curse. Appearing on the curriculum ensures a guaranteed run of revivals, though the vast majority will be accompanied by the rustling crisp packets, ringtones and other disruptive indications of teenagers taken to the theatre on sufferance.
Mark Babych's production commences with an outbreak of giggles, which is never a good sign. Worse still, the laughter does not abate, but becomes increasingly vindictive, until it seems almost possessed. With a sudden chill, you realise it is not a school party but a staging effect, reminding you that Arthur Miller's play, set during the Salem witch trials of the 17th century, is primarily an example of what happens when a well-ordered community is brought to ruin by a gang of teenage girls who claim to have only been mucking about.
Miller conceived the play as an analogy of the virulent, anticommunist campaign led by Senator McCarthy in the 1950s, yet it can be taken as a metaphor for any paranoid implosion of the past 50 years. At present, it seems to function as a dire warning about declaring war on unknown forces: clearly nobody in the current American high chain of command can have seen it. Or if they did, they have chosen to ignore the message that "there is prodigious danger in the seeking of loose spirits".
The Crucible stands as an imposing peak of American drama, yet most productions reach the summit following more or less the same path. Its fire- and-brimstone collection of fanatical priests and lawyers does not allow much scope for creative interpretation, though Babych's intimate, in-the- round staging has the plain but pleasing exactitude of a piece of Shaker furniture.
Sean O'Callaghan's Reverend Parris, Matthew Rixon's Reverend Hale and Stuart Fox's Judge Danforth are all suitably fearsome. But Hayley Jayne Standing's timorous Mary Warren stands up to them well, while Catherine Kinsella's hurried delivery captures Abigail Williams' petulance - though her seeming declaration that her seducer "stole me from my bed and put knowledge in my hat" conjures the strange image of Chook Sibtain's John Proctor stuffing an encyclopaedia in her bonnet. Sibtain tellingly signifies the aridity of the Proctors' marriage when he tastes his wife's cooking and immediately adjusts the seasoning. Productions of The Crucible differ only in terms of nuance - Babych perceptively offers his with a pinch of salt.
· Until March 1. Box office: 01204 520661.
