IN his third Playhouse production, after Sweeney Todd and Enjoy, artistic director James Brining directs another tale where the last breath is squeezed from life. The first was by brutal throat slashing, the second was slowly, stealthily stifling; the third is the most pernicious, a plague of malevolent gossip borne on the wind of hysteria and fear.

Brining has decided to set Arthur Miller's combustible morality tale both in its own period, the witch-trials that poisoned the Salem community from within in 1692 Massachusetts, and Miller's own time of writing his political allegory, when America was turning in on itself amid the McCarthy witch-hunt to expose Commie-sympathising artists. Hence the presence of a 1950s' cooker in the Proctor kitchen in Colin Richmond's design and later an orange plastic chair and a microphone for an interrogation scene.

This may jar with some – one Miller enthusiast from York went as far as to leave the press-night performance at half time – but the intention is not to dwell on 1692's Puritan paranoia or 1953's House of Un-American Activities Committee. Instead, Brining is throwing a light on 2014, where fundamentalist extremism is writ large once more in beheadings and Home Secretary Theresa May is overseeing the Communications Data Bill, potentially a 21st century witch-hunt.

Does Brining need to spell it out so glaringly? Well, we go back to the old debate of what constitutes theatrical truth, either sticking rigidly to 1953, leaving it as faded as the black-and-white photographs of the original production, or allowing a play to breathe anew in its design while entrusting the maximum potency to reside in the text. Largely, Brining does the latter, although one innovation sits uncomfortably or rather fidgets distractingly, in the form of the Procters' restless children, not usually seen in this play.

They appear to be in modern bedding and nightwear too, another link to the present, and to the future too, in a reminder of the devastating consequences of the cancerous behaviour of their elders, just as in Romeo And Juliet.

Brining's production further spans the years through the varying voices of his cast; some have the accents of early Pilgrim settlers; others use a more generic American voice; others float between the two. One alas has trouble pitching his voice at all: Alan Williams's Reverend Samuel Parris is the equivalent of a soprano fluffing her top C. He never recovers from his flat opening that initially flattens everything around him, until the entrance of Martin Marquez's John Proctor in a classicist interpretation of the anti-hero central role of an essentially good man brought down by one misjudgement.

Brining's cast is uneven, but there are terrific performances from Susie Trayling as his wife, Elizabeth; Kate Phillips as trouble-stirring, manipulative Abigail Williams, with her trumped-up stories of witchcraft; and in particular Daniel Poyser as Reverend John Hale and Joseph Mydell as Deputy-Governor Danforth.

The last hour is as devastating as it should be, the innovations settled in, the spacious Quarry Theatre turned into a claustrophobic cauldron of searing heat and inexorable progress from myopic church and authoritarian courtroom to the hangman's noose.

The Crucible, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until October 25. Box office: 0113 213 7700 or wyp.org.uk