‘A kind of popular fascism was developing in the United States.’ So recalled the great American playwright Arthur Miller during an interview for the 2017 documentary Arthur Miller: Writer. He was not, of course, referring to the age of Trump (Miller died in 2005 at the age of 89), but America of the 1940s and 50s, overrun by the paranoia and vindictiveness of McCarthyism. At that time, the Soviet Union had ceased to be a wartime ally and had become the harbinger of imagined and invisible dark forces, twisting the innards of America’s body politic. The world of film and theatre was a seeming nest of reds, and writers including Miller were hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee to confess any allegiances to communism.

Entrepreneurs of the current moral panics washing across the western world have imputed similar, almost supernatural powers to various groups: the LGBT+ lobby that wants to ‘trans your kids’ or the shady liberal elites engineering the Great Replacement, by which the country’s white Christian majority will be subsumed. It’s no surprise, then, that it seems to be Miller Season again in the UK. Courtesy of an unblinking brilliance, his work deals with the psychological parameters of social ostracism and moral absolutism, from the brittle 17th-century theocracy of The Crucible (1953) as a community is torn apart by witch trials, to the Brooklyn slum of A View From The Bridge (1955) where an Italian-American dock worker betrays his cousin to immigration services for fear he is corrupting a teenage niece.

Over the coming months, Scotland plays host to a trio of adaptations: the Tron Theatre gives us A View From The Bridge and a touring version of Death Of A Salesman starring David Hayman as Willy Loman comes our way, while Scottish Ballet’s version of The Crucible makes a bold return during May.

A View From The Bridge, Tron Theatre, Glasgow, until Saturday 15 March; Death Of A Salesman, Pavilion Theatre, Glasgow, Wednesday 5–Sunday 9 March, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, Wednesday 19–Saturday 22 March; picture: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan.