Blyth Festival 2025: Peter Hinton Davis to make Festival debut with 'Powers and Gloria'

BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN

This season at the Blyth Festival, two of the three founders are seeing some of their most celebrated works produced. For Keith Roulston’s Powers and Gloria, it’s only fitting that one of the most accomplished directors in Canada brings his special touch to it.

 

Peter Hinton Davis has two of the country’s most coveted theatrical accomplishments to his name: between 2005 and 2012 he was the artistic director of the National Arts Centre’s English Theatre - overseeing the company’s first-ever season of all-Canadian plays in the 2006/2007 season - and he has been named a Member of the Order of Canada. He has also been a stalwart for both the Shaw Festival and the Canadian Opera Company. And yet, with this season’s production of Powers and Gloria, Hinton Davis will be making his Blyth Festival debut.

 

The director says he is a tremendous fan of the Festival and has been a keen audience member for many of its shows, but this will be the first time that he will lend his talents to its uniquely Canadian mission. Hinton Davis says that approaching a project like Powers and Gloria - written now 20 years ago, but directing it for today’s audiences - offers him a chance as a director to honour the original story, but to provide historical context and reimagine the show in a way that puts on display the themes of the show in 2005 and how they are still as relevant in 2025 as they ever were.

 

That specific aspect of directing is of particular interest to Hinton Davis, who has directed both classical and contemporary plays, and the challenges and opportunities that are inherent in directing an older piece and breathing new life into it is something that he relishes. 

 

Hinton Davis took the time to speak to The Citizen when he was swamped with work at the Shaw Festival. And yet, he knows that the return to Powers and Gloria, two decades after it premiered at the Blyth Festival, is important and warrants his time.

 

Furthermore, there are some aspects surrounding the passage of time with this show that make it very interesting to him. 
First, he has discussed the show with Roulston. He was interested in the interactions between community members who are thrown together through circumstance and, perhaps, would not have interacted much otherwise. Beyond that, however, is the fact that Roulston centred the play around a man in his seventies who has suffered a stroke. He wrote it in his fifties in the early 2000s, but is now a man in his seventies who has suffered a stroke. 

 

Second is that Randy Hughson, the theatre titan, will be playing the role of Powers in this production. Twenty short years earlier, Hughson directed the original production of Powers and Gloria and Hinton Davis says he’s looking forward to tapping into that perspective.

 

When it comes to Hinton Davis’s background in theatre, he is a man who, in many ways, needs no introduction. He is a graduate of what is now Toronto Metropolitan University, at which time he pursued a career as an actor. However, it wasn’t long until he transitioned into focusing on the directional aspect of theatre, finding his passion there and what would become a long, fruitful, celebrated career.

 

In the early 1980s, Hinton Davis worked in new play development for Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille and Canadian Stage before heading west to work in the same field in Vancouver’s Playwrights Theatre Centre. He later took a position as the dramaturg-in-residence at Playwrights’ Workshop Montreal and then as an artistic associate with the Stratford Festival. During this time he also developed and directed a number of new Canadian plays that are now considered canonical, while also writing many of his own plays and libretti for two Peter Hannon operas.

 

From there, Hinton Davis moved onto the National Arts Centre in Ottawa from 2005 to 2012 before beginning an extensive period of work with the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake.

 

There are many things that Hinton Davis hopes to achieve through his direction of Powers and Gloria and messages he hopes to impart to members of the audiences. However, as a lifelong theatre professional who is always reinventing himself, he hopes to learn from his work at the Blyth Festival as well and that the connection with the local audience, which is so crucial to the work of the Blyth Festival, will be mutually beneficial.