CONOR Murphy's Crucible set makes a real virtue of the new sweeping rake of seats at the Abbey. Its looming, foreboding height is perfectly viewed from the vertiginous slopes of what used to be the worst seats in the house. Perhaps that's why the journalists were stuck up here for the first night, but you can forgive the Abbey a boast.

They've done a fine, cheap job.

Not only do they offer seats at the Abbey, but plays too from time to time.

And, of course, The Crucible is a great play. Rather uniquely, it is a play that was preceded by its own metaphor. "It's a witchhunt, " they cried in the 1950s when Senator Joe McCarthy began hunting the reds under the bed with his lunatic zeal. And Miller wrote about a witch-hunt.

The invitation of this utility, of course, is to adapt the play again and again to the politics of the time . . . it's all been given the implicit green light by the author, after all. The Abbey has done this with its ad campaign, choosing the play's Bushisms ("You are either with this court or against it. There is no middle road") and broadcasting them.

The Crucible is the story of how a combination of superstition, fear, human weakness and hysteria can lead to a diminution of liberty for "the greater good".

No wonder it makes such a tempting all-purpose vehicle for political statement. But overstating the metaphor does a great disservice to Miller's play.

It does not need such a crutch, and it is far wiser and grander than the implication of simple allegory implies. The Crucible has all the inevitability and humanity of the finest tragedy, and Miller has placed that in a meticulous, convincing and totally selfsufficient historical context. He shows people in a specific place at a specific time, yet he also shows that people never change.

In The Crucible, humanity is terrible and familiar; but only great drama has the scope to allow us to see the best and the worst of our kind simultaneously.

That is the continuing relevance (to use that too small-minded word) of Miller.

And doesn't Patrick Mason know it. The director's is a triumphant return to the Abbey.

And he contents himself with just staging the play . . . trusting its ineluctable tragedy, and the expert playing of the ensemble cast. Not a false note is struck throughout the evening in Mason's patient version. In particular, the long middle scenes are allowed develop slowly and portentously, the audience becoming more and more engrossed with each argument and twist, or, as is the case with the heartbreaking final scene between Proctor and his wife, by the easily carried emotion of the quieter moments.

It's rivetting stuff.

Mason leavens proceedings by allowing enough of Miller's humour through, in particular through Tom Hickey's Giles Corey, the litigious farmer. The midlands accent is not his alone, as Declan Conlon's sceptical and doomed Proctor could be from Laois. This and other Irish-isms (it's always "year" and never "years") are perfectly acceptable flourishes, which add an interesting echo of our own country's more stupid moments.

Ruth Negga plays Abigail without a hint of feminist revisionism . . . she's a nasty piece of work. Christopher Saul gives a remarkable performance as deputy governor Danforth . . .

perfectly capturing the contradiction of being an utterly logical man whose logic is at the mercy of superstition. Conlon is perfect as the upstanding outcast Proctor, while Cathy Belton as his wife is dignified without seeming too saintly, as is the danger with that role. A great play directed with great patience and sensitivity, and acted superbly. What more to ask?