Poetics of Theatre Space in Two Recent London Productions of Shakespeare's Plays

Abstract

This thesis examines the use of theatre space in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (2014) directed by Josie Rourke’s and Nicholas Hytner’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2019). Both adaptations rely heavily on the poetic potential of space, one by highlighting isolation and entrapment, the other by offering an escape into a vast, open world. Drawing on Gaston Bachelard’s concepts from The Poetics of Space it analyses how spatial confinement shapes the tragedy of Coriolanus, while openness and expansion define the world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.