2025 Oberon Shakespeare Festival

March 20, 2025

Something wonderful came to Oberon over the period of March 13-15, 2025 with the inaugural Oberon Shakespeare Festival, organised and promoted by the members of Oberon Rotary and featuring the acting skills of Come You Spirits. The word "inaugural" is used because it is strongly hoped that this will become an annual event, bigger and better each year.

There could be no doubt about the success of the 2025 festival, with a sold-out dinner performance, hundreds of people watching  A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Common and the enthusiastic responses to workshops at Columbia Aged Care and Oberon High School. It might have been the first time the festival happened but nothing suggested it couldn't be done again.

The festival was a project of Oberon Rotary and they have to be both thanked and congratulated for having the foresight (and courage) to bring this event to Oberon. With only seven members the effort was remarkable.

Because there are a lot of photos telling the stories of the weekend they have been broken into three parts:

• Columbia Aged Care, Oberon High School and a bit of street theatre
• The festival dinner at the Malachi Gilmore Hall with short performances by two of the actors
• A full presentation of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the open air at Oberon Common.

At Columbia Aged Care, Oberon High School and outside the Malachi.

Dinner and performance at the Malachi.

The performance at the Oberon Common.

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.

---

About Come You Spirits.

The troupe has this to say about themselves.

We're a touring troupe of actors - Jo Bloom, Charles Mayer, Ciarán O'Riordan, Charlotte Edwards, Dallas Reedman, Charley Allanah, and Chiara Osborn, with story-guide Nathan Meola, and we perform all the plays in our repertoire in magnificent indoor and outdoor 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 only a handful of characters, so it's clear and it's magical.

Come You Spirits in action.

Their web site can be found here.

---