Plenty of intensity: Lainie Hart and Isaac Riley as the Macbeths in Lakespeare’s 2025 production. Photo: Facebook.
Sandwiched in among the national capital’s rolling festivals, it would be easy for Canberrans to overlook an outdoor theater project competing for their attention.
But it looks like the Bard is still popular, and as relevant as ever.
Shakespeare by the Lake, Lakespeare, for short, enjoyed a great season and appears to have become a fixture in the social calendar, attracting strong audiences who have been rewarded with committed, entertaining and, particularly this year, compelling performances.
What may have been seen as a lark in the park has survived the pandemic lockdowns to grow beyond the comedies to stage stirring drama like Henry V.
Theatre is a risky exercise at the best of times, so tackling Shakespeare’s darkest play, Macbeth, could have been seen as foolhardy. Best stick to Midsummer panto, some might say, but it proved a master stroke that held its audiences spellbound.
Somehow the production conjured up a show that drew in an audience that spanned the ages and kept them bewitched in the imaginary Scottish gloom for a couple of hours despite the bright late summer sunshine.
That was real magic.
Macbeth also would have resonated with the Canberra’s many political junkies who have observed the consuming ambition that has destroyed leaders and governments in the national capital, not to mention the corrosive consequences.
Bring on Julius Caesar!
On the Patrick White Lawns for Macbeth. Photo: Facebook.
Macbeth also proved beyond doubt there is an appetite in Canberra for the breadth of Shakespeare’s works, and for them to be performed in the wild, so to speak.
There is something thrillingly democratic and communal for a thousand folk to sit down on a green and embrace an imagined world and their characters before and around them.
The collaboration with the Q in Queanbeyan and director Jordan Best also proved a success and has fortified Lakespeare’s position in the crowded Canberra events calendar.
There is real cultural capital in this and it deserves to prosper even more.
While the productions use rudimentary props, the free outdoor performances still need a bucket of money to be stumped up.
Sponsors, donations and government support go a long way to make it all happen, but it would be a shame if what has been steadily built over the years is allowed to fall away.
One hopes that more sponsors are enthused and that the ACT Government becomes even more committed to supporting a happening that Canberrans now look forward to.
Some education authorities may be foolish enough to turn their backs on the Bard, but as one of my tutors once said, you don’t need to study psychology to understand human nature, just experience Shakespeare.
So bravo Lakespeare, you’ve earned it. See you in 2026.
