Christopher Samuel Carroll

Christopher is a professional actor, writer and director from Ireland, trained at The Samuel Beckett Centre, Dublin, and Ecole Jacques Lecoq, Paris. Since moving to Canberra in 2016, he has become one of the city’s most prolific and celebrated theatre artists, winning the inaugural Helen Tsongas Award for Excellence in Acting in 2019 for roles in Twelfth Night, Icarus, Howie the Rookie, and Metamorphosis. As artistic director of Bare Witness Theatre Co., he has produced ten shows to date, in Ireland, the U.K., France and Australia, winning a reputation for raw, pulsating theatre that ignites the imagination. Described as “the master of the solo performance”, Christopher is renowned as a daring and skilled creator of one-man shows. His homage to one of Dublin’s best-loved figures, Diceman, played to full houses for a three-week run at Bewley’s Café Theatre in 2012, where it was acclaimed as “A captivating piece of theatre that combines speech, mime, humour and almost balletic movement in bringing the character alive...all done with the lightest of touches.” (Metro Herald) As a member of Lecoq-based ensemble Breadknives, he brought the barnstorming brawl The Emperor of America to the Camden People’s Theatre, London in 2014, Theatre de Verre in Paris, and the Edinburgh Fringe 2015. At Edinburgh, he also debuted his Victorian blockbuster, Early Grave, Fashionably Late, before touring to the Wexford Spiegeltent Festival, Smith’s Alternative in Canberra, and The Butterfly Club in Melbourne as part of their curated summer program in 2016. His Butoh adaptation of Paradise Lost, described as “a culturally shattering event”, was developed at Belco Arts, before touring to the Adelaide Fringe and to Perth, where it was shortlisted for the Best Theatre award at Fringe World 2017. His wordless physical odyssey, Icarus, debuted at The Blue Room, Perth, winning the Fringe World overall award for Dance and Physical Theatre, before a critically-acclaimed season at The Street Theatre in 2019. Recent work has included directing Carpe DM for Canberra Youth Theatre's Emerge Company in November; a solo adaptation of The Stranger by Albert Camus, hailed as “a form of theatrical and artistic genius,” at Gorman Arts Centre in December; directing and acting in Smokescreen, his sharp-shooting showdown about the dark arts of marketing, at Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre in February; and directing the cocktail-inspired cabaret The Gentleman's Companion at Louie Louie in March. He will be directing, devising and acting in the Bare Witness production of I Have No Enemies at Gorman Arts Centre in July 2022.