Yaël Farber on directing The Crucible: 'It's only in the darkest stories that you see glimmers of heroism'

And three of those plays – A View from the Bridge, All My Sons and now The Crucible – have been seen in London within a few weeks of each other. Is there any reason why this should be so, or is it merely a coincidence?

Yaël Farber, the South African director who has stunned Edinburgh and London audiences with her red hot transcription of Miss Julie and her lacerating account of the fatal gang-rape of a female medical student on a Delhi bus, Nirbhaya, is responsible for The Crucible at the Old Vic, and pinpoints the timeless dramatic function of these plays:

"I believe in what Yeats called the spiritus mundi, our individual participation in one governing, vast intelligence, and that arguments arrive in the collective awareness and become necessary at specific times. The Crucible will never become irrelevant; and if it ever does, we can ascend to the next level as human beings. It becomes timely when the human consciousness turns to a sort of self-searching."

While Miller wrote the play in the wake of the "reds under the beds" witch-hunt of Senator Joe McCarthy, he always claimed it was not intended merely as a response to that scare, any more than he intended All My Sons as a plea for the better inspection of aeroplane parts or A View From the Bridge as an attack on the immigration bureau.

As Farber points out, Miller was already disillusioned with Marxism when the hearings began. His objection to McCarthyism was that one's private conscience had become a state matter, and that is the metaphor in the great kitchen scene between John and Elizabeth Proctor in The Crucible.

And it's impossible to contemplate the play today in Britain, let alone see it, without thinking of the judicial processes currently underway, conducted against popular entertainment figures, in an attempt to comply with a public mood of vengeful indignation over alleged sexual abuse. "Is the accuser always holy now?" asks John Proctor, as slander becomes the weapon of opportunism.

It's because Miller, like Ibsen, deals in life-lies and our shared moral frailties that he touches us so deeply in his best plays. The Open Air production of All My Sons suited the play's back garden and decorated it with a Norman Rockwell-like poster of an idealised family in a white clapboard house. That material prosperity is built on the sand of Joe Keller's suppressed guilt: in allowing the defective plane parts to be fitted he sent young men to their deaths and let his partner take the blame.

Such a moral imbroglio is never going to be irrelevant, less so with the added ingredient of direct family involvement and the secret of Joe's son's suicide. Similarly, Eddie Carbone's act of betrayal in a close-knit Brooklyn community sheltering the Sicilian immigrants in A View From the Bridge is linked to a complicated emotional obsession with his own niece.

“I’m always suspicious when someone describes a piece of theatre as universal”

The timelessness of that tragic dilemma was further underlined at the Young Vic with a stage stripped of all furniture save the single chair that Marco raises ominously above Eddie's head; this transformed a usually awkward moment in a naturalistic production to a powerfully poetic one in Ivo van Hove's mythic staging.