In the cozy theater at the Irish Rep, John B. Keane’s 1964 drama “The Field” burns with a steady, old-fashioned light. As the villagers gather in the local pub to complain, drink, and do business, a warm glow suffuses the snug room. It seems like the safest of places at first, as a painfully-thin old widow comes in looking for the proprietor, Mick. She wants him to handle the sale of her four-acre field. “They say,” she says simply, “you’re an honest man.”

As it turns out, Mick is not an honest man. In the hands of another playwright, such a revelation might comprise the whole arc of “The Field,” but Keane uncovers Mick’s character flaws within the first five minutes. For “The Field” is not the story of a man, but the story of a village.

And from the play’s first moments, these villagers are bristling with life. There are good blokes and bullies, families and loners – and all of them feel wondrously alive. It’s a testament to the brilliance of Keane’s writing that he can immediately interest us in the lives of a dozen characters, stamping each one of them into our memory. And it’s a credit to the production’s fine actors (many of them Irish) that they inhabit their roles so fully that it seems they have known each other for decades.

Like any village, this one has its bully – a coarse, violent-tempered farmer named “The Bull” McCabe (Marty Maguire). The Bull has been leasing the widow’s field, and now wants to buy it cheap from Mick (Malachy Cleary). When Mick resists, citing his obligation to the widow, The Bull threatens to shut down his business. Mick, who has nine children to support, is no stranger to the uneasy compromises of small-town life, and he agrees to keep the auction out of the papers. But on the morning of the auction, a stranger arrives at the pub – an Englishman determined to buy the field (Chandler Williams).

The Bull, with his quick temper and his vicious tongue, is a crucial role, and Mr. Maguire, who was born in Belfast, settles on a temperament somewhere between a mean drunk and a twisted romantic. The combination succeeds, so that when The Bull slams his large walking stick against the bar, your skin crawls. He makes The Bull a frightening figure – irrational, impulsive, and remorseless – the sort of man who, after brutally beating his wife for letting a pony into the field, blames it on the pony.

The play’s central question is whether The Bull’s violence has the power to override the conscience of a whole village – to bully the auctioneer, cow the widow, buy the town drunk’s support, and coerce the community to cover up his vile crime against the rival English bidder. While many a jaundiced villager happily keeps silent, there are dissenters in Mick’s own family – his fiery, sharp-as-a-tack wife Maimie (the wonderful Orlagh Cassidy) and his earnest son Leamy (Paul Nugent). When the outraged village priest (Craig Baldwin) urges parishioners to come forward with information about the crime, he appeals to the flicker of conscience he glimpses in their eyes.

The director, Ciaran O’Reilly, who appeared in the recent Broadway revival “A Touch of the Poet,” finds O’Neill-like nuances in Keane’s drama. He looks for a workaday tone for The Bull’s poetic musings, and lingers just briefly on the tragic moments that arise in the flow of normal talk. He suffuses the actors’ faces with light, so we can see the play of humor or the pinch of resentment, or watch as their momentary romanticism is wiped clean by a mask of pragmatism. Facts trump abstractions in a poor agricultural town; in the end, the fact that means most to Maimie is that she has nine children depending on her.

“The Field” is a very old-fashioned play, and it dips into melodrama and preaching on occasion. Yet it remains a compelling exploration of the exchanges and compromises on which village life depends – a study in miniature of the working of society. Mr. O’Reilly’s fine production (and Charles Corcoran’s apt set design) make the audience feel like an extension of that warm old pub – included in its warm circle, complicit in its cowardice.

Until July 18 (132 W. 22nd Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, 212-727-2737).