In a bold but theatre-savvy move, Lakespeare, Shakespeare by the Lakes, has got together with The Q this year to present Macbeth – mostly outdoors.

Directed by Jordan Best, who last did The Scottish Play for Canberra Rep in 2016, it’s not the obvious choice for an outdoor production, but Lakespeare will be relying on the age-old magic of Shakespeare’s words to bring to life the atmosphere, the political manoeuvrings and the trajectory of the warrior king and his doomed wife. 

Macbeth is one of the easiest of all Shakespeare’s plays to understand. It rips along, it’s very short on subplots, although Macbeth’s opponents lurk in the wings, and it has wonderful parts for an ensemble cast of 11 actors. 

I caught up with Isaac Reilly, who plays Macbeth, outside The Q on a hot night overlooking Aunty Louise Brown Park where the show will open.

Reilly, a graduate of the ANU in molecular biology and drama, is the father of three children these days, so doesn’t have much time to tread the boards, and we last saw him at ACT Hub in Emerald City in 2021.

But when Best offered him the role of Macbeth, he could hardly turn it down. 

Reilly is not a superstitious man and takes the reputation of Macbeth as the unlucky play with a grain of salt, but when I tell him how my English teacher at school set out to prove conclusively that Macbeth was the perfect play, he agrees wholeheartedly. 

“I did study Macbeth at school,” he says. “It’s tragic, it’s the perfect play, it really is.”

“It’s the source of many popular sayings and even has ‘knock knock’ jokes… it drives through.”

The play might be perfect but the character of Macbeth is not – it wouldn’t be a tragedy otherwise.

A great war hero, he doesn’t shy away from killing, unless, as Reilly notes, he has time to think about it. Nor is he particularly smart – that’s Lady Macbeth – and the fake language he uses to describe the dead Duncan (“His silver skin laced with his golden blood”) hits a wrong note.

The iambic rhythm drops a beat here, too, Reilly tells me, saying: “It’s amazing how layered the language is.”

To him, though, it’s the supernatural scenes that are pivotal, as the witches wind Macbeth up, leading him to cry out against “the equivocation of the fiend that lies like truth”. 

As for the marriage of the Macbeths, he says, “it’s a close, deep relationship and that’s part of the tragedy… Macbeth is a war hero but not a politician. Lady Macbeth is, and together they make a formidable partnership”.

Yet it’s a partnership that is flawed. Macbeth doesn’t tell his wife that he’s had his friend Banquo murdered, so she is as surprised as everybody else when he freaks out on seeing his friend’s ghost, a sure sign that things are getting out of control on the home front.

Reilly has never done an outdoor show. The performances will always start in bright daylight, but he says: “It’s nice not to be relying on sets or lights [they’ll be miked up for the outdoor shows]. There are no limits to the imagination of audiences.”

Actors have always differed over how to play the ambitious hero, whether as a sensitive New Age Macbeth or a great warrior. 

“I’ve pulled back on the sympathy a bit,” Reilly says. 

“He certainly is a hero at the beginning, but his ambition is immediately evident and there’s also the matter of ordering the deaths of babies and wives, for which he doesn’t give any moral explanation.”

That, we agree, is probably because Macbeth appears to be an atheist. The play’s most famous speech, after all, ends with the words, “It [life] is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”.

And yet, Reilly reminds me, he goes out as a hero. Not wanting to be paraded around as a captive, the heroic Macbeth asserts itself again in his last words: “Lay on, Macduff, and damned be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’” 

It’s bound to send a chill up the spine.

Macbeth, The Q, Queanbeyan, February 12-16, pay what you feel. Free performances at Tuggeranong Park, February 21, Patrick White Lawns, NLA, February 22-23, and Haig Park, March 1. Paid performances, Act Hub Kingston, February 27-28 and dinner show, Shakespeare by the Vines, Lake George Winery, March 2. All details at lakespeare.com