Be- und Entgrenzungen des Raums in Barbara Freys Akademietheater-Inszenierung von Shakespeares Sturm

Focusing on the aspect of spatiality in drama and theatre, the article takes into view one particular German-language production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest staged in 2007 by the Swiss theatre director Barbara Frey for the workshop stage of Vienna’s Burgtheater. Intermedially drawing on Peter Greenaway’s movie adaptation Prospero’s Books, the theatre production takes the play’s marked dialectic between a well-nigh ‘classicist’ reduction of its real space and its concomitant expansion into an almost infinite amount of imaginary spaces on the dramatic level and congenially reproduces it on the theatrical level in using an extremely reduced stage (and cast) for an enormous extension of the play’s spatial possibilities, thus proving that, not only in terms of mimetic space but in terms of performance space, too, less is often more.