I Want to Sleep with Tom Stoppard
Toby Schmitz makes the issues play fashionable again with a dinner party that devolves into a war over theatre.
Overview
It's fair to say we all like giving a polemic, but rarely do we like to receive one. Yet when that polemic comes via the wit and deadpan metre of stage star Toby Schmitz, whose new play about plays is brazenly titled I Want to Sleep with Tom Stoppard, we’re inclined to listen with ease.
The show takes place within the confines of a family dinner to which fledgling actor Luke (Tom Stokes) has unexpectedly brought his rather more mature, capricious, and uncompromisingly sardonic girlfriend, Sarah (Caroline Brazier), to meet his bourgie parents, Tom (Andrew MacFarlane) and Jackie (Wendy Strehlow). They want to redirect him into a more income-generating, useful, or at least existent job; she's weathered a couple of decades' worth of such masked contempt and proudly claims to write 'theatre' in the religion box of the census. The four's bickering and underhanded games soon overwhelm the pasta and salad, though pair exceedingly well with some 12 bottles of wine.
With Tom Stoppard, Schmitz wanted to put aside theatrical metaphor and resurrect the straight-out 'issues play', a genre that's frequently derided, largely due to the habit of its entrants to become one-dimensional or didactic. He certainly succeeds in making the issues play fashionable again. But does he succeed in making it good? That's up for debate.
The jokes are great, and performances, particularly Braziers', transcendent, but the play is missing something. It has a little to say about theatre in contemporary society, and connects with few things broader, but what a show like this is crying out for above all is a powerful grounding in humanity. If the characters are having realistic arguments on stage, those arguments have to reverberate in their realistic behaviour and story. And I too frequently didn't believe these characters. That's the best way I can account for the alienation I felt at some points I was meant to be laughing.
Who are these people who are so extreme, mean, hyper-combative, and baffling in their actions as to make them inhuman? I still don't know. The riff on female versus male power that eventually emerges is similarly jarring. It may be that in weaving all its self-referentiality, Tom Stoppard couldn't avoid getting tangled.
However, I'm clearly in the minority, particularly on opening night, when the crowd is 100 percent theatre people, who are the best possible audience for this play. We could all write 'theatre' in the religion box. The repartee, one-liners, and particularly the stage-culture references have seemingly everyone in stitches; the silence when Tom offhandedly dismisses Sarah's life's work is thick with recognition. It's something that does strike a chord with any theatre disciple, even if we ultimately worship at different altars.
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