Shakespeare in the Age of Scrolling: Shake & Stir Bring Macbeth to QPAC

There is a moment in Shake & Stir's new production of Macbeth when a camera closes in on a character's face — capturing the private flicker of thought, the inner voice that no one else in the room is meant to hear. It is a moment Shakespeare wrote for an empty stage. Here, it becomes something altogether more unsettling: a broadcast.

That tension — between what is performed and what is felt, between the story we tell and the truth underneath it — sits at the heart of this bold, visually arresting production, which storms into QPAC's Playhouse from 6 to 21 June.

For Shake & Stir, the Brisbane-based company that began in 2006 as three actor friends with a passion for Shakespeare, the timing of this production is anything but accidental.

Twenty Years in the Making

"We have been discussing doing a Shakespeare for 20 years since we started," adapter Nelle Lee told us at the QPAC media call. "We did want our first Shakespeare to be something that was well considered — and Macbeth is such a fantastic text that we just couldn't resist."

The company has spent two decades doing Shakespeare in schools, and in various forms on the mainstage. But this is the first time they have brought the bard to a full mainstage production in his pure form. Jeremiah Wray leads the production in the title role, with Nelle Lee as Lady Macbeth. And of all Shakespeare's works, this was always going to be the one.

Director Nick Skubij is characteristically direct about why. "Macbeth has always been the one in our minds — if and when the time is right to do a Shakespeare, it was always going to be this one."

The timing, in 2026, feels particularly pointed. "War, Trump, politics, the contemporary world around us," Skubij says. "It feels like a timely reminder to look at what can happen when ambition and power goes unchecked — and people who shouldn't have power are given it, and the consequences of that. That's always going to be relevant, no matter what era it's set in. But in 2026, sadly, it feels particularly relevant."

Shakespeare, Faithfully — and Differently

One of the more interesting creative decisions behind this production is what the team chose not to change. Shakespeare's text remains largely intact — abridged slightly, but not rewritten. "It's not adapted as such," Lee explains. "We've remained faithful to the Shakespeare text. What we've done is look at it through a contemporary lens. The creatives have had the joy of being able to bring it to life in a modern aesthetic."

For Skubij, this fidelity to the source material was both a creative and a practical advantage. "Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's shortest plays. It's all there and it's all so good — and it's very filmic in the way it reads and presents." That cinematic quality, he says, gave the team permission to lean hard into the production's most distinctive element: live camera technology.

The Stage as Broadcast

What audiences will encounter at the Playhouse is unlike any Shakespeare they have seen before. Screens. Live camera feeds. A CCTV aesthetic that turns the theatre into a rolling news cycle — and the characters into unwilling, occasionally willing, subjects of their own coverage.

"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 kind of atmospherics. We're able to push in closer and more intimately to these characters."

For Lee, the technology unlocks something essential about the play's psychology. Macbeth's soliloquies — among the most famous in all of Shakespeare — become something new when a camera is present. "The cameras are privy to moments that potentially the audience wouldn't be — or whoever else is in the world of the play may not be able to see. But the audience can." It creates, she says, "a very voyeuristic vantage point."

Achieving this in practice has been the production's greatest technical challenge. Broadcasting wirelessly in an 800-seat theatre full of people on their phones — all of them, in a sense, broadcasting too — required solving complex problems of bandwidth and stability. "You're as good as your internet speed," Skubij says. "Finding stability in the technology has been technically challenging. But really exhilarating."

Visceral, and Unapologetically So

The two scenes we witnessed at the media call left no doubt about the production's ambition or its intensity. In the first, Lee's Lady Macbeth pressed her partner toward their terrible plan with a charged, almost suffocating intimacy — raw, powerful, and impossible to look away from. In the second, the play's climactic fight sequence, Skubij's commitment to "ultra realism" was on full display: kinetic, visceral, and deliberately unsanitised.

Movement and intimacy coordinator Nigel Poulton has led the fight sequences, and Skubij is candid about the brief he was given. "I want it to look real. I want it to be visceral. I want it to be bloody." The result, from what we saw, delivers on every count.

"This is a horrible story about blood and death and war," Skubij says. "I was really interested in not sanitising that — and showing what that can actually feel like in an almost filmic way."

What to Take Away

For Skubij, the invitation to the audience is ultimately one of self-reflection. "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 moral at the heart of Macbeth — that unchecked ambition, winning at the expense of everyone else, is not the way to go — lands differently, he suggests, in the current moment.

"I would just hope that they take away a little bit of self-reflection. This story is an absolute reminder of the importance of being decent people — and of being careful of what you wish for, and what you would do to get it."

Twenty years into their remarkable run, Shake & Stir have chosen the most ambitious version of themselves for this milestone. Macbeth, at the Playhouse, from 6 to 21 June, looks set to be exactly that.

Review, June 17, 2026 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Wednesday night at QPAC's Playhouse, mid-run and in full flight — Shake & Stir's Macbeth was something else entirely.

Multiple monitors flanked the sides of the stage. A massive industrial screen at the front doubled as curtain and broadcast surface, with another vast screen at the rear — live camera feeds bouncing between them, inescapable. A rotating stage floor shifted performers and set pieces into entirely new configurations mid-scene, the physical world of the play constantly in motion beneath the digital one above it.

Jeremiah Wray and Nelle Lee are magnetic. The live feeds put their faces in close-up while they perform metres away, creating an intimacy that's deeply unsettling in the best possible way. The soliloquies — those famous private moments — become something like CCTV confessions. The fight sequences are visceral and unapologetic, and the atmospherics — smoke, gymnastic lights dropping from the rafters, near-total darkness — are cinematic in scope.

This is not Shakespeare as obligation. It's Shakespeare as total spectacle — and it asks something real of you on the way out.

Twenty years in, and still raising the bar.

Macbeth is at QPAC's Playhouse from 6–21 June 2026. Tickets via QPAC. Photography by Brit Creative.