Verdi's Macbeth

Name: Verdi's Macbeth
Start: 2025-11-21T10:00:00+11:00
End: 2025-11-21T12:30:00+11:00
Location: Kensington Town Hall

Schedule

Fri Nov 21 2025 at 10:00 am to 12:30 pm

UTC+11:00

Location

Kensington Town Hall | Melbourne, VI

Award-winning indie company BK Opera returns this November with a chilling, immersive take on Verdi’s Macbeth - a psychological horror experience that puts the audience within arm’s reach of ambition, madness, and murder. Staged inside the historic Kensington Town Hall, the production transforms the venue into a decomposing dinner party - decadent, deranged, and deeply unsettling.
Director Kate Millett (OperaChaser Best Director 2024) leads a powerhouse creative team and cast, all of whom bring serious acclaim to the table. Millett’s vision for this Macbeth is intimate and unrelenting: “This is opera that doesn’t just touch you - it consumes you.”
CAST
Henry Shaw - Macbeth
Livia Brash - Lady Macbeth
Daniel Szesiong Todd - Macduff
Nicholas Beecher - Banquo
Conducted by Leonard Weiss (Berlin Opera Music Award winner, Tanglewood Fellow), with set design by Max Bowyer and lighting by Gabriel Bethune (both Greenroom nominees, 2025), and costume design by Oliver Hall, winner of Best Costume at the Dionysus Awards.
🔥 What the Critics Say About BK Opera
"Millett is never short of fresh ideas in her quest to reinforce opera with an edge... she creates an unsettling claustrophobic tension that traps the audience." Herald Sun, 2018
"This is experimental opera uncommon to an Australian stage." ArtsHub, 2019
“Incorporating daring ideas on a shoestring budget... Millett has persevered through the years while applying a fresh inquiry into operatic works and proving to be a vital, alternative voice for the art form locally.” Australian Arts Review, 2024
“Millett does not stint on the seriousness of the drama, providing no easy answers to the disturbing mystery.” Man in Chair, 2022
“Inescapably gripping.” OperaChaser, 2017
Opera Up Close. Horror Up Closer.
With audience members seated mere metres from the action, this Macbeth strips away the polish and grandeur of traditional opera, revealing raw ambition, psychological fracture, and moral rot. Multimedia may bleed into the edges of the production, but the fear is always analogy - and always real.
Whether you’re a seasoned opera-goer or a fan of live psychological thrillers, this production will leave its mark