PRESIDENT Obama invokes God – “God bless you and God Bless America” – in his White House pronouncement after American forces shoot dead Bin Laden. Glasgow Celtic’s manager, the Irish Catholic Neil Lennon, is under constant surveillance. A York taxi driver has to remove a cross from his dashboard.

“Goodnight, thank you and may your God go with you,” the comedian Dave Allen used to say with a twinkle in his eye amid the Irish troubles.

Reminders of religion, fundamentalism and sectarian division are all around us, making Arthur Miller’s 1953 morality play resonate ever louder down the years beyond its original political allegory of the witch-hunt activities of the House of Un-American Activities Committee.

However, the size of cast – 19 in this production – precludes it from being performed more often and indeed it was last staged in York by Stagecoach Youth Theatre York ten years ago.

Lips were further whetted by the prospect of seeing The Crucible in a crucible, as the opening show of York Theatre Royal’s seven-month In The Round season.

As with last summer’s The Wind In The Willows, the stage has been built out over the stalls seating with a bank of seating behind and the crescent of dress circle and upper-circle seats in front.

Technically not a complete circle, if you want to be pedantic, it nevertheless feels enclosed – a claustrophobic cauldron for a community on the boil – and the height of the auditorium still enhances the epic scale of Miller’s drama in associate director Juliet Forster’s searing production.

Rather than flies from above, trapdoors from below become important in the changing of the wooden scenery in Dawn Allsop’s set, where the tree branches are bare and the tops of the wood panels have rotted away. Poison is indeed spreading through the Salem community in 1692 Massachusetts, where the community has the accents of early Pilgrim settlers (rather than generic American voices).

It is a community ruled by stultifying fear and paranoia, which tips over into hysteria when the young girls, led by the manipulative Abigail (Lucille Sharp), trump up stories of witchcraft, accusing the village womenfolk of affiliating with the devil. Zealous church and court alike become embroiled in the inexorable progress of the witch-hunt that follows as the village turns in on itself.

Sharp’s Abigail and Helen MacFarlane’s troubled servant girl Mary Warren are the outstanding performers among the six students from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, but the girls’ possessed scenes are less striking and convincing than the more intimate interplay, especially between Stephen Billington’s confessional, church-challenging anti-hero John Proctor and his steadfast wife Elizabeth (Helen Kay).

The courtroom second half perfectly suits the round configuration: by now you can smell the fear as the authoritarian figure of Michael Roberts’s Deputy Governor Danforth applies the rigorous law, the chill nail in the coffin amid the over-heating around him.

In our tinderbox world of terror and fear, the next Crucible is alas never far away, and this tremendous, timely production makes that thought all the more disquieting.

The Crucible, York Theatre Royal, until May 28. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk