Together, Toby Schmitz and Brendan Cowell are like a theatregoer’s wet dream. They have again teamed up for the final production in Sydney Theatre Company’s 2008 Main Stage season, Rabbit. Schmitz sat down with Garrett Bithell.

“We’re definitely of the same artistic gene pool. We’re both theatre rats – we both love it, it’s our bread and butter, and we can’t imagine being away from it for too long. Brendan has the kind of career where he could easily not interest himself in theatre, but he chooses to pay for that flight back from New York, chooses to miss out on auditions, and I think we have a very strong overlap there.”

    So says Toby Schmitz, who is undoubtedly one of the most in-demand theatre actors in Australia at the moment. He is talking about Brendan Cowell, who in turn is one of our most in-demand theatre practitioners. Together, they have become one our most exciting theatre partnerships, a symbiotic relationship that came to a head earlier this year with the downstairs Belvoir Street production of Ruben Guthrie, Cowell’s brutally honest play about work, family and excess. Directed by Wayne Blair, it sold out before it even opened.

    “Other than that, we’re friends – drinking stories, similar sense of humour, similar opinions on looking at pretty girls! All of which you can do in the theatre,” Schmitz tells AXN. “He really makes me giggle. And he’s proactive. I need a bit of that in my life, so I borrow that from him. I don’t know what he takes from me!”

    And now comes Rabbit by British playwright Nina Raine. Cowell is directing, Schmitz is starring. The play, which earned Raine the Evening Standard and Critics’ Circle Awards for Most Promising Playwright, is the final production of Sydney Theatre Company’s 2008 Main Stage season.

    Rather than spend her 29th birthday at her dying father’s hospital bedside, PR executive Bella defiantly decides to party at a slick bar with a tangled web of friends and former lovers. As the alcohol flows, so too does the sharp and spiky banter about sex, ambition and relationships. When the smart young professionals begin to reveal their jealousies and insecurities, the sparring gives way to a battle of the sexes. Schmitz plays Bella’s psychological-bully ex-boyfriend, Richard.

    “It’s good to play someone who’s undoubtedly an alpha male and quite dominant, and even a little humourless,” Schmitz says. “I’m always mystified by people who don’t have much of a sense of humour – I don’t know how they get on in the world.

    “Nina Raine is very clever and cool in the sense that she captures how mates actually react. It’s a very well-crafted play. It has this slight illusion of people just banging on in a bar about who’s fucked who, but it’s very tight in the use of language. It really does sound like how real people speak, which is very cool for an audience. And it’s talking about the big stuff, as all good plays do – love, death, sex. It’s also a lot about ‘Saturn’s return’ in a way, which I don’t think I fundamentally agree with because I’m 31 and it hasn’t happened to me yet! What am I doing? Who am I with? What job am I doing?

    “The thing that makes my skin go a bit goose bumpy in this play is when was the last time you talked to your dad, and don’t forget about love, kids. You know, our parent had it – don’t just ditch it along with everything else. Don’t forget about love as we get harder. It’s a pretty apolitical and sexy generation we live in, with multiple partners and stalling on marriage, kids, even love, later and later.”

    Schmitz, who has kind of fallen into a niche playing charismatic, dapper but fundamentally-flawed men on stage, fell in love with the theatre scene as a pimply teenager ogling beautiful actresses at cast parties. “I was born and raised in that particular briar patch,” he says. “I went to theatre a lot as a kid, and fell in love with it young – it’s a sexy place!”

    Surely to the envy of his fellow thespians, Schmitz is booked solid until July next year. After Rabbit wraps, he goes into rehearsals for the 2009 Sydney Theatre Company production of Travesties by “the god of living playwrights”, Tom Stoppard. Then Ruben Guthrie has been promoted to a full season on the upstairs stage at Belvoir Street Theatre.

“I like the Sydney theatre scene – I feel at home here,” Schmitz muses. “And Sydney is a fun town to go out in. It’s not as civilised as Melbourne – I love theatrical and political debate in Melbourne – but hanging out in the Belvoir foyer having a drink is a pretty cool place to be.”

Schmitz is wrapped with the appointment of Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton as co-artistic directors of Sydney Theatre Company. “They’re both theatre rats. And I’ll do anything for theatre rats, because their hearts are in the right place.”

Rabbit by Nina Raine, Wharf 1, Sydney Theatre Company (Pier 4, Hickson Road, Walsh Bay) until January 11, 2009. For tickets call the box office on (02) 9250 1777 or go online at sydneytheatre.com.au