Tom & Toby

When I meet Toby Schmitz – actor, playwright and director – to discuss his new play, I Want To Sleep With Tom Stoppard, he is in the midst of rehearsals for the Ralph Myer's Belvoir production of Noël Coward's 1930 comedy of manners, Private Lives. A lovingly-worn and discernibly thumbed-through copy of Stoppard's Rough Crossing, a comedy written in 1984 that freely adapted Ferenc Molnár's The Play At The Castle, sits on the table in the middle of the room. Schmitz declares the similarities between Private Lives and Stoppard's Rough Crossing too strong to ignore, too helpful in this preparation to dismiss.

It's not just Stoppard though, or Coward. Throughout this conversation Schmitz will excitedly name-check Joanna Murray Smith, David Williamson, David Hare, Sarah Kane – the list goes on. This is a man who lives and breathes theatre, who has written a play about its place in our world. Naff? Maybe – but Schmitz has plenty of ammo for both sides of the argument that plays out on stage, framed by the story of a young actor bringing home his older girlfriend, also an actor, to meet the family, concerned parents with a certain disdain for the theatrical arts.

“When I started writing it five or six years ago I'd seen a lot of plays that were lacking an obvious metaphor – some of them very good, some of them very bad – that were just naked issues on stage. So I thought maybe I should write a play where there is a naked issue on stage and I thought, 'Well, what do I actually care about?' And it's not who gets the Whitley's, or the end of the Howard era or anything, I just really don't care enough about that, but what I do care about is theatre.

“Then I thought the issue could be theatre, and that reminded me that some of my favourite plays or films are about exactly that; The Libertine, or Stage Doors with Catherine Hepburn,” Schmitz cuts himself short, though you get the feeling the list is significantly longer. “There used to be a time when it was totally cool to talk about it, and it wasn't naff. I suspect some part of it is about the dwindling of theatre being that relevant in our lives any more as it was to say forty or fifty years ago when you had far more of these plays about plays on. I also suspect it's a very Australian thing; that talking about art at all, in any format, is seen as a wank. Every cab driver and most adults I've ever met, and contemporaries even, or schoolmates feel that way; 'But it's not a real job',” he teases himself in the voice of the naysayers.

It seems Stoppard too is grounded enough to know there's a crowd that just don't 'get' theatre, and a chance meeting between Schmitz and the playwright led to some brilliantly witty self-deprecation from the great. “I met Tom Stoppard when I first started to write the play about five years ago, and he was very charming, and he said, 'I'm just glad it's not called I Want To Sleep During Tom Stoppard.' I laughed and went red and that's all I got out. Someone had told him I was writing a play, I didn't even bring it up myself, so I had the double whammy of him being very witty and funny and me reeling from the fact that he knew I was writing a play called that anyway, and then my head going, 'Does he think I've got the hots for him? Do I?!' There's one man…”