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The Crucible is a 1953 play by American playwright Arthur Miller. It is a dramatized and partially fictionalized story of the Salem witch trials that took place in Massachusetts during 1692. Miller wrote the play as an allegory for McCarthyism, when the United States government persecuted people accused of being communists. As Muller explains “when the atmosphere is too tense, fear takes over. The inhabitants of Salem regarded themselves as keepers of a holy truth. If the light of this truth would go off, they thought the world would collapse. When the world believes so much in their purity, it is common for situations to be pushed to far extremes”. 

The lighting concept draws inspiration from Muller’s words, to create highly contrasted stage pictures, where the two elements,  the light of “distorted truth” and the darkness of fear, fight against each other making society ressemble a battlefield.