★★★½☆ Miller’s breakthrough play still lands a devastating blow nearly 70 years after its Broadway premiere.

Capitalism’s capacity to inspire individual greed would build modern America through war and peacetime and inflect the rest of the western world, implicating more of us as beneficiaries of exploitation as globalisation crashed through borders. We wear the garments of fast fashion chains today, for instance, without a thought for the often-exploited workers in developing countries whose factories are sometimes deadly firetraps.

Playwright Arthur Miller retained the sense memory of the collapse of his father Isidore’s coat business in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash, wiping out the Miller family’s wealth and spinning adolescent Arthur into engagement with the radical politics of Marxist ideology. Born in 1915, Miller had no memory of World War I, and his efforts to enlist in the US Navy for World War II were repeatedly rejected because of knee and wrist damage sustained by an old football injury, the details of which were later recorded in Miller’s FBI file.

So, instead, Miller worked as a fitter in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, occasionally volunteering to work on Navy ships in the Hudson River, while writing patriotic radio plays...