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.