But he leapt at the chance to play John Proctor in a new production of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, at London's Old Vic. "Going back into a play like this, where you really just have the bare bones of text and very little else, was a deliberate antidote", he says, to the techno world of Middle-earth on screen.

Yael Farber's fierce, intense production opened to rave reviews. Now Australian audiences have a chance to see it, filmed live, in cinemas around the country.

Armitage, 43, remembers reading The Crucible as a drama student, and connecting with the part and the play. He studied drama at LAMDA and worked on stage and in musical theatre before beginning a range of TV roles. He played leads in North and South and Robin Hood, and had three seasons in the espionage series Spooks. He now lives in New York.

Before rehearsals for The Crucible began, his own preparation involved a visit to Salem, where the play is set. "I always think it's the most potent sort of thing, to go to the source. [I] wanted to try to connect with who they were as people, tread the paths they trod." Reading Arthur Miller's autobiography, Timebends, was an extra incentive; Miller went there to explore the place, "and I was looking for the ways that Miller and his works connect". He feels that the voice of Proctor is very much Miller's voice.

In the rehearsal room, he recalls, "we had a huge board where we bought images and pieces of music and our collective ideas, so you could really see where other people were finding sources." The cast of 23 spanned generations, from actors fresh out of drama school to performers in their 80s. "They brought books about the Holocaust, images of Eastern Europe, Africa, the Far East. None of it was going to put a stamp on the play that was too identifiable," he says, but it emphasised the scope and range of the text.

There was also intense physical preparation, and exercises and improvisations that brought out the conditions under which these characters lived, colonists in a small religious community, "working the land and tryng to survive. We created a kind of church for ourselves we'd attend every day". There was a sermon, "and we brought our collective thoughts on what that would be about, and what would be spoken at these meetings that were so central to the culture".

Miller's play, set during the witchcraft trials of Salem in 1692, and written under the shadow of the anti-Communist scare of the 1950s, has perpetual relevance, Armitage believes. "I think he was looking to the past and seeing into the future, he was saying it has happened before, it will happen again, and it's happening now in my world. When a society 'others' its own people, and legislates to perpetuate that othering, it's quite a simple idea, but it has so many cultural resonances."

But the play, he says, is also a powerful exploration of character. He talks about investigating the complexities of the relationship between Proctor and his wife, Elizabeth (Anna Madeley), of its fault lines and its strengths. In Act Two, he says, "we're not seeing a couple fighting, we're seeing a couple fighting to hold themselves together; their love is so deep, but their relationship is so damaged, and the circumstances of their universe get so ahead of them that they have no time". For him, the final act is in many ways, "Elizabeth's act".

What's more, he adds, everyone on stage, at one point or another, has a crucial role in the drama. "I really believe in the ensemble principle," he says emphatically, "and there are no small parts in this play".

He is sure he will be back on stage soon, but the Crucible experience, he says, "has set the bar really high, it's hard to find something that will come up to that. I feel Yael has been a real teacher for me, and I do think we'll work together again." Whatever happens, he adds, "I took away a toolkit of ideas and ways of working that I will probably always apply.

"I wasn't the only one who felt like that. It was interesting, Annie Firbank (who plays the character of Rebecca Nurse), she's in her 80s, and I remember she said, 'I've never worked like this before, I've never made discoveries in the rehearsal room like this'. To be so changed at that stage in your career is exciting."

It was the same, he says for Samantha Colley, just out of drama school, and playing the pivotal role of Abigail Williams, the young woman who drives the charges of witchcraft in the community. "She said to me on the last night, 'I'm worried I'll never find anyone like Yael again.' I said to her, 'You'll always take with you what she gave you. And I'm sure you'll work together again'."

The Crucible screens in short seasons at selected cinemas nationally from February 4. See cinemalive.com for details.