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	To Sheffield where Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible based on the Salem witch trials of 1693 opens in early February (2004) at The Crucible Theatre.  It’s just over ten years since this play was last staged at The Crucible and making her directorial debut there is Anna Mackmin, the new associate director.  The cast includes Douglas Henshall, who was last seen on stage in TomStoppard’s Trilogy, The Coast of Utopia. Douglas plays the part of John Proctor, the farmer at the centre of the storm. He joins me now on the line from Sheffield. Douglas you’re opening on the 4th of February, so still busy in rehearsals.  Are they going well? Yes, they seem to be going quite well, but they are at that slightly neurotic stage when your opinion on how you’re getting on changes from day to day really. Yesterday was a reasonably good day, so today I feel reasonably confident. But I think we’re in pretty good shape, we’ve got a good cast of people together and we’ve got a very good director taking us through it, so I think we’re alright. What first drew you to the role of John Proctor? I suppose when I was reading it, it wasn’t so much John Proctor to be perfectly honest with you it was the play as a whole. I just thought it was an astonishingly exciting piece of writing and I suppose the moral dilemma at the centre of Proctor’s life, that’s the kind of drama I enjoy. For those of us who don’t know the story give us an idea of that dilemma. Well, he’s been having a dalliance with a girl called Abigail Williams, who is only seventeen and his wife found out about it and she kicked her out of the house and he’s trying to repair his marriage basically.  But there is always a threat that this girl might reveal the details of their affair, in what was strictly Puritan times, which would have destroyed him really and so that’s the kind of difficulty he’s in, at the start of the play anyway. The play goes into other matters of the conscience. Do you think it’s still as powerful today as when it was first written by Miller in the 50’s? Absolutely, I think it’s powerful because what Arthur Miller seems to do in everything I’ve read that he’s written is  understand human beings and they don’t change that much. So in this production you stay close to the original play and staging? Yes, by the book absolutely.  I don’t see any need to go away from that because it is fabulous as it is. I think if it aint broke don’t fix it. I’m very excited to be up here doing this play. The theatre itself, I went into it the first week and I thought ‘What do you mean it takes one thousand people?  Where do you put them all?’ It’s such an intimate space and I’m very excited about working on it. Transcribed from The Arts Programme Broadcast Januay 23rd 2004.