A conversation with Cimolino, Wyn Davies as they take on The Tempest
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CONNOR LUCZKA, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Antoni Cimolino and Geraint Wyn Davies are set to helm this year’s Stratford Festival production of The Tempest, continuing a decade-long trend of the two collaborating as director and actor, respectively. Ahead of the comedy’s opening on May 25 – and the official kick off to the 2026 season – Cimolino and Wyn Davis sat down with the Times for a conversation on this year’s production, and on their many storied collaborations throughout the years. The following Q-and-A has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Can you tell me about the first time you two encountered each other?
G: “Well, Antoni and myself, we met as actors in a production of Henry V ... in 1989. Antoni was playing the Dauphin and I was playing Henry V, and it was a fantastic production, but a little bit challenged, let's say, on the journey, but we all came out of it pretty swimmingly. That's how we first knew each other, as players.”
A: “The dauphin’s the prince of France, Ger’s the king who eventually fights and wins and gains a big portion of France, and he was pretty much a prince all the way through. It was a pleasure to work with him, and while the process was challenged for a number of reasons, Ger made it all fantastic. He was a pretty great leader, a leader in every way, and ultimately the production, we are very, very proud of it. It was beautiful.”
G: “It's interesting, you can have the best time, and sometimes the shows don't live up to the joy that you've had, and others supersede anything you could possibly imagine, having struggled all the way through, and you go, ‘Wow, this is extraordinary.’ So, we were fortunate to be part of something like that early on in our journey in Stratford. So, of course, we took different routes. Antoni decided to run the entire world …”
A: “We've had the pleasure of occasionally working with each other from time to time, but Ger's done so much work on film and television and directed film, so his time took him away from the festival for a number of years. I’m so glad that in the last decade or so we’ve been reunited.”
Did you know at that point that this is a person I should collaborate with more?
G: “At the time I just enjoyed Antoni's company, but I did. I literally left after that particular season to go over to England for a couple of years … Then when I came back, we did a very interesting thing here on the 50th anniversary of the festival when Richard (Monette) was running it … We had three of us meant to play Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. There was Colm Feore, myself and Richard Monette, and we were going to share that throughout the season for different chunks of time, because of scheduling and things like that, and so when I came back, Antoni was in a completely different situation than when we'd left, both of us being actors, so it was really interesting then to have that relationship, because … when you first meet someone that's kind of who you are to each other, and yes, of course things change, but I always remembered us as two guys who were acting.”
A: “I first saw Ger's work at the Shaw Festival, and he was a young actor, and he was charming and he would throw himself on the ground a lot. So it was fun to work with him a few years later, and then to watch the career change and evolved, but there was always a respect and affection for the experiences that we had on that Henry V. When he eventually got back to the festival, and different projects – you were also involved, Ger, in the Chris Plummer (King) Lear that we did at the Lincoln Center in New York, so and then it was years later, a few years later, that we started to work together, and –
G: “And then it became unstoppable!”
That unstoppable collaboration, what spurred that?
A: “What Geraint can do on stage, very few people can. He is, at this time in his life, in his craft, a singular thing. There's very few actors in the world who are able to do some of the work that he does, and the range is enormous. His ability to bring Shakespeare to life is really so beautiful to experience, and so the festival has benefited from somebody who's really at the height of their game.”
G: “We've had a lot of integrity, but along with that, we've had a ton of joy. We laugh a lot in our collectives, not just Antoni and myself, but our casts, our ensembles are extraordinary. They've been a lot of fun, and I think that keeps you wanting to go back to the trough and go, ‘Hmm, that was a joy.’ I think the integrity and joy part of a collaboration cannot be beat.”
Antoni, you’ve mentioned that being a director, you’re a starting impulse that invites everyone to contribute. Ger, can you think of an instance where you’ve seen that?
G: “Both of us wanted Prospero to be a man who was looking for humanity, and not as – and I'm not talking about anybody specifically, but it has historically been a part for an actor to end their career or to go and out and do a great grandstanding performance, which is great, but I had no interest in that, and I don't think Antoni did either. And so we started with a place where the person was a real human being, and that's fabulous, because then you don't have to come out and have both arms in the air the entire time with one leg up. You can actually just be a person, you can take a little time, you can come from personal experience rather than something that happened 1600-and-something years ago.”
A: “I wanted a darker vision of the play than I'd done last time, but at the same time, as Ger said, we also need to find the humanity, the movement towards forgiveness that is in this play, and so as we explored different things. In talking about that with Ger, we would have, before rehearsals, a number of talks which led to some really interesting decisions – I think some stuff that I hadn’t seen before in productions of The Tempest that Ger is realizing on that stage. That came from both of us having had experience in the past. You'll see the manifestations of that darker world throughout the old mise en scene, the way it looks, everything else, but specifically what it might mean for Prospero was something that we did together."
There are obvious parallels between this being Shakespeare’s last written work and this being your last as artistic director, Antoni. It’s interesting that you were resistant to that Ger in the sense of an actor’s final performance. That kind of parallel, was I wrong to think about that?
A: “For me, in choosing this play, there is something about living through an experience, and then perhaps leaving it, and I think that was there for Shakespeare as he wrote it. But what it has turned into over time can be an actor's swan song, and we wanted to find out what the experience was really like for Shakespeare, for Prospero, in going through this, and what we came at was not so much a kind of sentimental ‘here are my greatest hits and I'm going’ – is an exploration of how hard it is to achieve some good things in life, to get beyond the anger, the bitterness, to make sure that you're doing right by your family, by your daughter, by the people around you, and you find a way through, and that's not easy, that comes at a cost, which I think is a more interesting story about what Shakespeare was going through. … So we were trying to find a solution to this, where the play was, what the play is about, in a more human way.”
G: “A phrase that came to me was, ‘It's the cost of letting go.’ And so that's interesting when I think about you, Antoni, in your final season in this iteration with the festival … What have you had to do in your life, or Prospero in his, or anybody for that matter? And then you have to leave, you have to let go. You have to let go of your daughter, you have to let go of your sense of betrayal, you have to let go of everything, and indeed, you have to somewhat let go of your relevance. All these things are in this character, and the cost of that. To answer your question, I'd say I'm not Antoni, but I'd say of course there are echoes and parallels and stuff for anybody who's coming to an end of something, but I think certainly not coming to the end of a career, it's just an end of a chapter.”
The Tempest opens May 25, when the Stratford Festival officially opens with its red carpet at the Festival Theatre.
For more information, visit https://tinyurl.com/2pynanfp.
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