Live Events

​Geoff Cartwright is the upcoming guest poet at Zamia Theatre, 22 Main Street, Tamborine Mountain, on Friday 21 March 2025. 6.30 for 7.00pm start. BYO drinks and nibbles and blackboard poems; ice creams, tea and coffee available. Donation at door (suggested $10 pp minimum). Calanthe publications will be available for purchase on the night. RSVPs to calanthecollective@gmail.com.

 

This is an event you won’t want to miss.

 

Geoff Cartwright is a former actor, artistic director of the community theatre company, The Rough Hewn Theatre Troupe and teacher of secondary Drama and English. He writes prose fiction and a poem or two.

 

Geoff started his working life as an actor in Brisbane in 1977, in plays produced by the Queensland Theatre Company and the TN! Company. Amongst other roles, he played Christy Mahon in J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, Marchbanks in Bernard Shaw’s Candida, played Hamlet, Romeo, the street singer in Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, Henry Carr in Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, Estragon in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and The Great Weevil in Clowneroonies, the most fun he’s ever had in the theatre. He also did a number of radio plays for the ABC.

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In the early 1980s he moved south where he worked for New England Theatre Co., The Riverina Theatre Co., The Hunter Valley Theatre Co., the Ensemble, Philip St Theatre, Wayside Chapel Theatre, Q Theatre, Belvoir St, Bell Shakespeare Co and Shakespeare on the Green and others, playing, amongst other toles, Jack in The Man from Muckinupin, Bluntchli in Arms and the Man, Woyzek in Buchner’s Woyzek, Macbeth, Malvolio in Twelfth Night, the Duke in Measure for Measure, Lawrence in Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party, Torvald in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Gradgrind in Hard Times. He is an award-winning narrator of the audio book of Tim Winton’s The Riders. 

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Later a teacher of drama, where his particular passion was mounting outdoor productions of Shakespeare’s plays. For ten years, he was the artistic director of The Rough Hewn Theatre Troupe, a community theatre company based in Manly, Sydney for which he directed plays by Shakespeare, Racine, Dario Fo, Ray Mathew, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Moliere, Dylan Thomas, Anthony Burgess, Alana Valentine and Dymphna Cusak. 

 

Geoff has a postgraduate degree in creative writing from the University of Sydney, is an occasional poet with a preference for writing prose fiction, is a prolific letter writer and a passionate lover of riding-his-motorcycle-a-long-way, having ridden much of the USA and all around Australia.