2026 Oberon Shakespeare Festival - The Festival Fringe

March 26, 2026

The 2026 Rotary Oberon Shakespeare Festival was about more than just a play performance and the Festival Feast. Part of the objective was to explain Shakespeare to the wider residents of Oberon.

This took several forms - workshops at Columbia and the hospital to get the residents involved in the festival, an event at Oberon High School designed to explain Shakespeare to students, a demonstration of stage fighting techniques and a Q&A where people could talk about the importance of Shakespeare to life today.

As you can imagine, life in a nursing home can be pretty much the same every day so Come You Spirits brought some Shakespeare to Oberon's two aged care facilities. As these events were held simultaneously, Oberon Matters was only able to attend the show at Columbia.

These events included audience participation and even something unusual. Following suggestions from the audience, a scene from Hamlet was performed with a Glasgow accent. It sounds weird, but it worked and showed that Shakespeare can be adapted to almost anything.

The event at the high school was designed to explain to students how Shakespeare used apparently minor characters to glue stories together, how the stories are constructed and what those characters and stories might mean to today's audiences as well as those in the 17th century. Students from Oberon Hugh School were joined by schools from Bathurst and Kelso (Lithgow were also coming but were disappointed when their transport fell through at the last minute). The examples were limited to Macbeth but could be applied to any of Shakespeare's plays as well as works by other playwrights. Understanding characterisation and plotting is essential to understanding how to write or understand any form of fiction.

Interestingly, Come You Spirits operates with a very small cast and so have to constantly manage to tell the stories using the minimum number of characters, This doesn't mean that the excluded characters are redundant, just that stories can be told in many different ways.

Come You Spirits went to the Oberon Markets to give a demonstration of stage fighting techniques, both using weapons and hands. Members of the audience were invited to join in and learn how to make hitting someone look real. Acting isn't just about learning lines but about presenting realistic action and like stage magic, stage fighting relies on diversion and deception. It was interesting to see how quickly people could be taught how to punch and slap each other in ways that looked real to the audience.

The final event was also at Oberon Markets and was a discussion of why Shakespeare is relevant to today. The works of Shakespeare are some of the fundamental building blocks of the English language we speak today. (One wit once commented "Shakespeare wasn't a good writer. Just look at all the clichés he used in Hamlet.") An interesting point is that Shakespeare's work was written to be performed and nothing was published in print until seven years after his death. The words were meant to be said, and reading them came later.