Brisbane’s own Shake & Stir Theatre Co have spent 20 years building one of Australia’s most inventive theatrical companies. They’ve tackled Orwell, Shelley, Dickens, and Dahl. They’ve toured nationally, run education programs across Queensland, and brought more than 330,000 people through the doors at QPAC alone.
For their 20th anniversary, they’ve chosen Shakespeare. Specifically, they’ve chosen Macbeth. And from the two scenes we witnessed at this week’s media call, it was clearly worth the wait.
Macbeth runs at QPAC’s Playhouse from 6 to 21 June, with Jeremiah Wray in the title role and Nelle Lee as Lady Macbeth.
Why Macbeth, Why Now
Director Nick Skubij doesn’t need long to answer the question. “War, Trump, politics — the contemporary world around us. It feels like a timely reminder of what can happen when ambition and power goes unchecked, and people who shouldn’t have power are given it.” He pauses. “In 2026, sadly, it feels particularly relevant.”
For adapter Nelle Lee, the decision to tackle Shakespeare’s most gripping tragedy was twenty years in the making. “We have been discussing doing a Shakespeare for 20 years since we started,” she told us at the media call. “We wanted our first Shakespeare to be something well considered — and Macbeth is such a fantastic text that we just couldn’t resist.”
The production remains faithful to Shakespeare’s text, abridged slightly but not rewritten. “It’s all pretty much as written,” Lee says. “What we’ve done is look at it through a contemporary lens.”
Theatre Meets Broadcast
What makes this Macbeth genuinely unlike anything Brisbane audiences will have seen is its use of live camera technology — CCTV feeds, live broadcast screens, and close-up camera work woven through the action in real time.
“Live cameras in this production are not only allowing the characters to broadcast their agenda in real time,” Skubij explains, “but they’re also giving us another theatrical tool — just like light, just like any atmospherics. We can push in closer and more intimately to these characters.”
For Lee, it unlocks something essential about the play’s famous soliloquies. “The cameras are privy to moments that potentially the audience wouldn’t normally be. It creates a very voyeuristic vantage point.” Those private inner voices — Macbeth’s most haunting quality — become broadcasts of their own.
Getting the technology to work in an 800-seat theatre, with 800 people on their phones, has been the production’s greatest challenge. “You’re as good as your internet speed,” Skubij says. “Finding stability in the technology has been really technically challenging — but really exhilarating.”
Raw, Visceral, Unapologetic
The two scenes previewed at the media call set a clear tone. The first — Lee’s Lady Macbeth pressing Wray’s Macbeth toward their plan — was intimate and psychologically charged, impossible to look away from. The second, a climactic fight sequence, was kinetic and unsanitised.
Fight and Intimacy Director Nigel Poulton has led the physical sequences, and Skubij is direct about the vision. “I want it to look real. I want it to be visceral. I want it to be bloody.” He has no interest in softening the darkness at the play’s core. “This is a horrible story about blood and death and war. I was really interested in not sanitising that.”
A Story That Asks Something of Us
Ultimately, Skubij hopes audiences leave with more than entertainment. “It’s very easy to identify. We’ve all felt the ambition. We’ve all felt the desire to have something that’s not ours.” The warning embedded in Shakespeare’s text — about unchecked ambition, about what we sacrifice to get what we want — is one he wants to land with full force.
“I would hope they take away a little bit of self-reflection. The moral story here is that winning to the detriment of everybody else is not the way to go.”
Twenty years in, Shake & Stir are swinging for the fences. Macbeth, at the Playhouse, promises to be one of Brisbane’s unmissable theatre events of 2026.
Macbeth is at QPAC’s Playhouse, 6–21 June 2026. Tickets via qpac.com.au. Photography by Brit Creative.
