The Ides of March 2025 will see the inaugural Oberon Shakespeare Festival. It's being organised by Oberon Rotary, with performances and workshops by the Shakespearean specialist group, Come You Spirits.

Rotary members couldn't resist getting into the props bin.

Obviously, planning is still in the early stages, but the proposed program is:

• Thursday March 13 - Players visit Columbia Aged Care Home.
• Friday March 14 - Workshop with Drama Students at Oberon High School.
• Friday March 14 (Evening) - Feast at the Malachi Gilmore Hall including a fifty minute performance by Come You Spirits. This will be a ticketed event.
• Saturday March 15 - Mini street performances in the main street between 10am and noon. This will be  a free event.
• Saturday March 15 - The full cast of Come You Spirits will present a twilight performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Oberon Common. Another free event for the entire community.

Jo Bloom from Come You Spirits wears Titania's wings in the Titania Motel!

This will be a wonderful opportunity to bring an accessible and different version of Shakespeare to Oberon, and what better place to do it than in a town named after a character in one of Shakespeare's better-known plays? Oberon Matters will be following and reporting on the progress of the project over the next few months.

Note about the page background: The faint image you see in the background is the first page of A Midsummer Night's Dream (page 145) as printed in the First Folio of Shakespeare's works, published in 1623. The image is courtesy of the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

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About Come You Spirits.

The troupe has this to say about themselves.

We’re a touring troupe of actors - Jo Bloom, Charles Mayer, Sontaan Hopson and Ciarán O’Riordan, with storyteller Nathan Meola, and we perform all the plays in our repertoire in magnificent outdoor and indoor spaces, to music composed by Brandon Read, in lighting designed by Adam Applebaum, with photography by Syl Marie.

We adapt Shakespeare plays to be told by 4 characters, with the actors taking one character each. It’s clear, and it’s magical.

Come You Spirits in action.

Their web site can be found here.