The Crucible is a play for which certain co-ordinates are always fixed: there will be hysteria, there will be rumours of witchcraft, there will be solid Shaker furniture. But as an example of paranoia induced by an unsubstantiated threat, it very much remains a play for our time.
The American establishment no longer demonises left-leaning intellectuals, and has overcome the need to worry about witches. But there will always be new bogeymen to take their place. "There is a prodigious danger in the seeking of loose spirits," states one of the village elders - a striking reminder that evidence of witchcraft can be as elusive as evidence of weapons of mass destruction.
Anna Mackmin's fiery, urgent revival dramatises a debate that still feels very much alive. John Procter's withering defence that there "might be a five-legged dragon in my house, though no one has ever seen it" could be a sardonic aside delivered to the Hutton Inquiry.
If there's a downside to Mackmin's full-pelt pacing, it is that some of the more subtle verbal shadings are lost. The benefit is that this weighty play is never allowed to become ponderous. Les Brotherston's set has the pristine whiteness of a puritan meeting house, against which the action unfolds with stark, monochrome clarity.
The Crucible is a play about community, and every contribution from the large cast is made to tell. Douglas Henshall has a brooding, outsider bearing as Proctor; Michael Gould brings the haunted intensity of a fanatic to the witchfinder general, Rev Hale; and a quietly touching note of foreboding is sounded by Cherry Morris's Rebecca Nurse.
"We burn a hot fire here," declares Ian Bartholomew's inquisitorial governor Danforth. "It melts down all concealment." Mackmin's Crucible within a Crucible similarly glows with white heat.
· Until February 28. Box office: 0114-249 6000.
