Matthew Radford Davies
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Actor, Director, Teacher

Welsh by blood, English by birth, European by nature, and transatlantic by profession, my dogged pursuit of excellence in theater -- both on stage and on the page -- has brought me to Staunton, Virginia, where I teach acting and directing in Mary Baldwin University's Shakespeare and Performance graduate program in association with the American Shakespeare Center at the Blackfriars Playhouse.

Following an early professional career as an actor and director in the UK and numerous US tours of Shakespeare plays with the celebrated troupe Actors From The London Stage, I ended up staying to study in the Department of English at The University of Texas at Austin, where I completed a Ph.D in Renaissance Drama in 2012. During this time, I earned numerous B. Iden Payne and Austin Critics Circle awards and nominations for my theater work in the vibrant Austin community.

An ardent advocate of the Renaissance ideal of the multidisciplinary artist and individual, I continue to integrate my theatrical and academic careers, nurturing actor-scholars in our unique MLitt/MFA program, while engaging in dramatic projects, both as an actor and a director, that favor ensemble and inspire collaboration.

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​2021-22

Even though Covid shut down so many avenues for work for theatre artists over these past two years, I count myself fortunate to have carried on producing - both on the page and the stage - throughout the pandemic, while only losing six weeks of in-person teaching.

After performing in Othello and Twelfth Night for the American Shakespeare Company's 2020 summer/fall season, the following year I was offered the particularly rewarding experience of being hired by alums. In the summer of 2021, I directed a five-handed production of Romeo and Juliet for Starling Shakespeare Company, founded by recent graduates Jessie Lillis and Heron Kennedy, as part of their successful inaugural season at Mackinac Island in Michigan.

In early Spring 2022, I was hired by the University of Virginia to direct a contemporary play by Mj Kaufman, How To Live On Earth, which follows the lives of four disaffected applicants for a one-way mission to Mars. Affecting, witty, and poignant, the drama considers whether our instinct to find new frontiers is really a flight from our own existential reality and obligations on Earth.

This summer, I return to Prague Shakespeare Company after a four-year hiatus to direct my favorite Shakespeare play, Henry IV, Part 1, with Irwin Appel helming as Falstaff. I then head to Cincinnati Shakespeare in late summer to play Kent in King Lear, my first four-times Shakespeare and my first experience with this wonderful company. May the fourth be with us.

On the page, my essay, "'This is the strangers' case': Accenting Shakespeare's ESL Characters," was featured in ​Shakespeare and Accentism, edited by Adele Lee, and published by Routledge. This collection explores the consequences of accentism - an under-researched issue that intersects with racism and classism - in the Shakespeare industry across languages and cultures, past and present.

Later this year, my chapter, "'O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain': Hamlet and the Rhetoric of Repetition," will appear in Building Embodiment: a collection of exercises to illuminate poetic text," edited by Karen Kopryanski and Baron Kelly, again published by Routledge. Both of these essays underscore my continued efforts to write on subjects that turn my practice into theory.

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