2025 Oberon Shakespeare Festival - Part 2
Dinner at the Malachi Gilmore Hall

March 20, 2025

A highlight of the festival was a dinner at the Malachi Gilmore Hall. Catering was by the ladies of Oberon Inner Wheel and they did an excellent job of feeding the 100 guests (it was a full house) so there was time for eating, socialising and watching some extracts from Shakespeare's plays.

Inner Wheel preparing the meal, and the members of Rotary. And the kitchen.

Parts of four plays were performed in the night by two players from Come You Spirits - Jo Bloom and Charles Mayer. The plays were the Bard's big hits - Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream (of course), plus Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest (the one we all hoped to avoid at school). Each excerpt only required two actors, but the themes of each play were explained and illustrated.

MC for the night was Neville Ross from Oberon Rotary, and Wayne Barker. (if Macbeth had been performed on the night, Wayne could have played Macbeth to add a little more meaning to Malcolm's line "The dead butcher and his fiend-like queen".) Wayne told the old joke about how school was a lot easier in Shakespeare's day because nobody had to study Shakespeare.

Every table had a sign featuring the name of a character from one of Shakespeare's plays, with a quote from that character. It wasn't until later in the night that people found out that they would be asked to read the quote to the rest of the room.