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In a turbulent time for live performing arts in Australia, with cancelled musical tours, shrinking orchestras and rising production costs as audiences spend more carefully, Sydney Theatre Company is one of the few that has managed to post a surplus. Through a mixture of funding and investments, careful programming and a few hits – including The Talented Mr Ripley and this year’s An Iliad starring David Wenham, the company is a steady port in the current theatrical storm – and nowhere is that steadiness more clear than this new, straightforward production of Doubt: A Parable.

Written by John Patrick Shanley (Moonstruck), Doubt takes place entirely on the grounds of a small Catholic school in New York’s the Bronx in 1964, where sharp-edged principal Sister Aloysius (Pamela Rabe) maintains strict standards for students and teachers. When the wide-eyed Sister James (Shannen Alyce Quan) raises a concern about Father Flynn (Sam Reid) meeting privately with a young boy from her class, Sister Aloysius – already suspicious of the more modern and folksy priest – is immediately resigned to the worst possible outcome. Father Flynn, however, insists he is innocent.

The student in question is the only Black child in their school; Sister Aloysius thinks this makes the boy a prime target, while Father Flynn maintains he is offering vital support. For 90 minutes, the play constricts, expands and constricts again as the characters make accusations and defend their positions. There is no evidence to confirm or deny the claim. Only certainty and, of course, doubt.

Doubt’s original 2005 production scored four Tony Awards and took home the 2005 Pulitzer prize for drama. The 2008 film adaptation (starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams and Viola Davis) was nominated for five Academy Awards. These accolades have made Doubt a modern classic and, with its small cast size and strong script, promises impactful theatre on a relatively lean bottom line. All you need is the right creative team and a powerhouse cast.

Here, Marion Potts, freshly returned to directing after serving as chief executive of Performing Lines, is at the helm. Her production is crisp, smartly unsentimental and brisk, sweeping through Shanley’s lightly heightened dramatic dialogue with clarity and confidence. On Bob Cousins’ turntable set, which revolves from Sister Aloysius’ office to a winter courtyard and back again – an Our Lady of Grace statue always watching – there is a palpable sense of cold, everything washed out in muted white and greys. Damien Cooper’s lighting slates through single windows and traps characters in its shadowy bars.

It might, however, be a little too brisk. Shanley’s script is packed with juicy showcase scenes, offering caustic lines and spiky jokes along with impassioned statements of belief and struggle, but it comes most alive in the messy moments of human conversation. This is where actors can do deep and excellent work – not just in how they speak but how they listen to each other. Too often, though, Potts’ production rarely lets us linger in the discomfort that makes this play sing.

This is a shame, because it would strengthen the good work happening on stage. Sam Reid, perhaps best known to audiences from ABC’s The Newsreader and his deeply charismatic turn as Lestat in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire TV series, is confident, charming and warm as Father Flynn. His complexities are played close to the chest, eliciting gasps at least twice from an opening night audience when his demeanour began to shift. Similarly, Rabe is a formidable Aloysius, but her final moments feel disconnected from the ones that come before it. (What do we lose when we bustle through dialogue?) We also move too quickly through one of play’s knottiest and impactful scenes: when Aloysius brings her concerns to the student’s mother (Zindzi Okenyo). Spending more time sitting with the realities, contradictions and differing perspectives the two women raise would better serve the shape of the play – and give more room for Okenyo’s wonderfully layered performance to cut through.

Despite this, Doubt still works, only occasionally showing its age. It is still engaging and satisfyingly watchable, and this production was smartly cast. And it still gives you that feeling, sitting in an audience, that you can’t get from anywhere but live performance – the electricity of real people building a mood, a moment and a story in real time, making something wholly unique to everyone together in that room on that night.