Haptic Experience and Fluid Boundaries

This chapter treats the 2011 production of Macbeth at Joan Brehms’s theater in Český Krumlov, drawing on the work of Schechner, Heidegger, and de Certeau to examine audience experience and the director’s use of space. Many scenes of the production seemed to lack a definite setting because they were enacted on the move, as actors strolled to keep pace with a slowly revolving seating area. This staging emphasized Macbeth’s theme of developing nationhood; the audience’s loss of orientation linked Shakespeare’s Scotland with the fluid identity of the Czech Republic, whose boundaries and national identity were evolving long after Scotland and England’s boundaries had solidified.