How Two Years Ages A Play Like A Fine Wine

"Down on that Old Fitz stage if you put 15 people on it it's incredible, or if you put one person on it it's incredible. The beer and the cool kids and even the couple of crims I think that hang there make it all a very exciting place to be and give the theatre great kudos and juju."

"The beer and the cool kids and even the couple of crims I think that hang there make it all a very exciting place to be."

Schmitz is back in Sydney for ten days to direct the Old Fitz Theatre's remount of their 2014 hit production Howie The Rookie, starring Andrew Henry and Sean Hawkins. He's squeezing in the directing gig between filming season four of Black Sails, the American cable TV series set up as a prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson's epic novel Treasure Island. After he finishes season four he has a six-month break, in which time he's not sure what he'll be doing: "If we don't go for another season, I'll go to New York with the Broadway season of The Present which I did at the STC last year, either that or I'll be back in Cape Town in another six months doing another season, so it's a bit hard to judge what I'll be doing over this bit. Normally I want to rest to be honest, and go and see a few good plays, and see my mates and have a beer and so on."

Returning to Howie The Rookie after two years offers Schmitz, Henry and Hawkins a chance to finesse the production, as well as "clunk heads together again". "We're all chums, the three of us," Schmitz says. "[Rehearsal]'s been 'Hey, do you wanna come over to mine and bring a longneck and let's get a play up again?'

"[The play's] deeper, sharper, funnier, sexier [now]; it'd be weird if in two years it hadn't improved, just by maturity, like a wine, y'know?

"Any time that passes informs a project… You walk into the room and everyone's changed a bit: someone's lost someone, someone's no longer going out with that girl anymore, someone's had a tragedy, someone's had a joy, someone won the Lotto, someone's poor. Life changes and you bring that into the rehearsal room subconsciously or unconsciously, so that it sort of resets the playing field. And there's also things you get to try out, when you do a remount, you go, 'Look, we didn't get this bit wrong but are there even better options.' John Cleese used to say, 'There's a perfect number of laughs in every gag, you should be going for not one more and not one less.' That's a fun kind of neverending game to play."