“Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased”: The Clinical Gaze in the National Theatre of Scotland’s Macbeth

While using dramatis personae to illuminate psychological disturbances might seem to be spurious methodology, Freud often did, and inherited a long tradition of critical observation dating back to medieval doctors who had used art to depict the bodies of the mentally ill. This study takes the relationship between the clinic and theatre as an entry point to understanding how the National Theatre of Scotland’s 2012 production of Macbeth, which was largely based on Freud’s reading of the play, represents madness on stage and what its political implications are for a twenty-first-century audience. Because the NTS staged Macbeth as a one-man production in the setting of a mental ward, it deliberately invoked psychological approaches to understanding the mental patient’s experience. However, this production ultimately undermines such approaches through the use of audience and character positioning, critical gaze, and sensory experience, all of which implicate the assumed objective audience in the mental patient’s madness.