Aged vampire back on stage IN PERSON /
Canadian actor Geraint Wyn Davies 'shakes off the dust and fires up the engines'
to return to telling 'great big stories' at Stratford
By: H. J. Kirchhoff
Performing Arts Reporter
April 26, 1996
AFTER more than four years as the star of Forever Knight, the Toronto-
made CBS-TV series about 800-year-old vampire homicide detective Nick
Knight, Canadian actor Geraint Wyn Davies was looking for something
completely different.
Nothing could be more different than the role of Petruchio in the
Original Shakespeare Company's production of The Taming of the Shrew, a du
Maurier World Stage presentation beginning a three-day run last night at
Trinity-St. Paul's United Church. It will be Davies's first proper stage
role since he first signed on with Forever Knight, which filmed its 72nd
and final episode in February.
"This seemed like the best way to shake off the dust and fire up the
engines," Davies said during an interview this week, relaxing on a plastic
chair in the day-care room of Trinity-St. Paul's. "I owed it to myself to
do this. It's the right way to come back, like shooting out of a cannon,"
he said, adding to the metaphorical mixture. But there's no denying his
excitement: "I get to do this great role, I get to experiment, I get to
chew the scenery a bit. I get to do what I came into this business to do:
tell great big stories. And I get to do it all with a group of people I
like and respect.
"Of course," he added with a grin, "my agents went squirrely."
The Original Shakespeare Company - artistic-director Patrick Tucker and
his associate and life-partner Christine Ozanne - created quite a stir at
the last World Stage with their star-studded production of As You Like It,
based on Tucker's controversial theory of the proper way to present
Shakespeare's plays, a method he claims is based on Shakespeare's own
approach: no rehearsals and no full scripts; each actor receives only his
or her own lines, with three cue words as introduction; in place of
rehearsals, actors have one or two coaching sessions with Tucker, who
gives them a few loose rules about staging, some advice about diction, and
tells them to have fun.
Ozanne acts as prompter during performances, sitting on-stage at a
podium and giving the actors cues as necessary. In As You Like It, at
least, the results were often hilarious, and surprisingly good
Shakespeare.
Davies described this rehearsal process: "We (he and Tucker) get
together for two or three hours and discuss theory, and work on scenes
from other plays - Julius Caesar, the Scottish play, Henry VI, As You Like
It - but never from Shrew."
How does he feel about it? "I don't know," he confessed. "I haven't sat
still since Saturday. I don't know if Shakespeare is meant to be done in a
week.
"I discovered something that made me feel better. It doesn't matter if
I make a mistake. I can't make a mistake. It's nice to be thrown into an
arena where there's no right and wrong, and told to just see what you can
come up with. . . . This fills the coffers of the soul.
"It's totally the opposite of doing something that reaches a gajillion
viewers," he says. "It's like getting 550 people in a room and having 19
of them get up and do a play. . . . It's like volunteers from the
audience." He considered for a moment. "Well, I guess we're better than
the average volunteer."
In fact, Tucker makes it a point to recruit first-rate actors for his
productions. This year's Shrew cast includes Stratford veteran Lucy
Peacock as Kate, along with such familiar theatrical names as Ted
Atherton, Mark Burgess, Sally Cahill, David Ferry, Michael Hanrahan,
Ellen-Ray Hennessy, Yanna McIntosh, Richard McMillan and John Ralston.
But Davies - or at least Nick Knight, TV's favourite neck-romancer - is
the reason people are coming from all over North America to see this Shrew
, with Forever Knight and Geraint Wyn Davies fan clubs scooping up tickets
by the dozen. Davies, for his part, seems both amused by and uneasy about
the attention.
"I hope they know they're coming to The Taming of the Shrew," he said.
"I can't be doing too much Nick Knight here."
His intensely loyal following certainly didn't come about because he
was an on-screen sex object. In fact, Nick Knight couldn't get emotionally
involved with any woman without also rousing his blood lust, and he was
trying to quit feeding on humans. "I made a decision right at the
beginning that I wasn't going to do the beefcake thing," Davies said. "I
never so much as undid the top button of my shirt once in the entire
series."
Not that he's complaining. "Fan clubs are basically a group of people
who like your work. How bad can that be? In fact, there's a little group
of people who have been with me since Airwolf."
His stint with the short-lived Airwolf series was the first time Davies
was told he was selling out by taking a popular television role. "I had to
leave Stratford a week early to do Airwolf," he said, "so I went around
and asked other people in the company how they felt about it. The people I
most respected - Susan Wright, Brent Carver, Scotty Wentworth, a few
others - all said, 'Are you nuts? Get out of here! Go! It's an
opportunity.' "
Davies freely admits that financial security was another advantage of
the Forever Knight gig. Also, he got to direct. "I think I directed more
shows over the last couple of years than anyone else."
He directed the final episode of the series. "I got a phone call at 2
o'clock the last day of filming, telling me to change the ending into
something more ambiguous. In the original ending, I died, Catherine
(Disher) died, everyone died. We called it the death show."
Does this mean that the series might be revived? "Possibly," Davies
said. "More likely it would be two-hour movies. Mostly, I think, it was
about syndication. If you want the series to continue in syndication, it's
never good to have a final episode full of dead people."
Davies's professional career, pre-Forever Knight, took him to the
Stratford and Shaw festivals, among other jobs in Canada and Britain. He
has been married for nearly 11 years to artist Alana Guinn, whom he met at
the Shaw Festival, where she was a designer. They and their two children,
10 and 8, moved in December to Santa Barbara, Calif. Asked if the move was
in aid of getting work in films, Davies grinned and replied, "It was in
pursuit of good weather," adding, "and film work. But I can go anywhere to
make movies, and work with anyone."
Now that he isn't locked up into a Forever Knight contract, Davies
isn't letting any grass grow under his feet. He worked in two films
between Forever Knight and Shrew, and the future looks busy. "It's nice to
be asked to do things," he said. "I certainly have more choices. The
problem becomes what to do next, rather than whether there will be
anything to do next.
"Forever Knight has given me a cushion," he said. "Rather than nap on
it, I have to launch from it. It's a nice position to be in."
Copyright 1996 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. and its licensors
All Rights Reserved