Grief is the Thing with Feathers: Toby Schmitz on the ‘miracle’ text, writing, and making money as an actor

If an Uber driver asks Toby Schmitz what he does for a living, he lies.

He doesn’t tell them he’s an actor, a playwright, a director or a novelist. “It depends how I feel, but I tell them I work in diplomatic affairs, ie, I’m a spy,” he divulged.

What happens if they have a follow-up? “‘I’m so sorry, I can’t talk about it,’” he would respond. It’s perfect. “That’s my go-to these days, especially if I’m looking really scruffy.”

Schmitz has been on stage and on screen for a quarter of a century, but he doesn’t get recognised, not for local dramas such as Underbelly and Somersault or international productions such as Black Sails.

Even less for treading the boards with major companies and fringe theatre – a Shakespeare or three here, a Stoppard or two there, a Chekhov, a Shaw and an Ibsen among the legion.

He is, like most thespians, a jobbing actor. There are photo shoots, Broadway debuts and Netflix shows, sure, because Schmitz has bills to pay. It’s an unreliable profession, so Schmitz also writes and adapts, plays such as Lucky, Pan and Capture the Flag.

He just published his first novel, The Empress Murders, a claustrophobic detective fiction-turned-horror. When it comes to writing, he’s always thinking two or three projects ahead. But acting?

“No, because that way lies disappointment and nightmares,” he told The Nightly, wry but not self-pitying. “Hopefully something is on the horizon, and if not, then maybe it’s time to think about writing.

“I’ve always seen (writing) as, if not a commercial goal, then at least something for me to do or my mates to perform, to keep me in the theatre, which I love. It doesn’t feel like work. It’s an excuse to perform or a way to pay rent.”

Schmitz doesn’t need to think too much about his next acting gig just yet. Next week, Belvoir St Theatre will premiere an adaptation of novelist Max Porter’s acclaimed 2015 book, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, which Schmitz is not only starring in but co-adapting with director Simon Phillips and lighting and set designer Nick Schlieper.

Grief is the Thing with Feathers is the story of a family – a father and his two young sons – dealing with the sudden death of the mother. As they try to process their loss, a crow visits their home to help them work their way through.

The crow can be literal and not, and appears to each character differently at different times. Schmitz is playing the dad and the crow.

He picked up Porter’s book a decade ago and was struck by it, and how its structure was already halfway to a play. The Belvoir version is, Schmitz said, not a radical reworking, and will be faithful to the source material. He, Phillips and Schlieper started the process a few years ago, went through a workshop, and then let it percolate until now.

He wasn’t the only one who saw the story’s dramatic potential – an Irish company adapted it for stage with Cillian Murphy in the same roles Schmitz will play, and Benedict Cumberbatch will soon be seen in a film version.

“It’s such an enduring text, you can pick it up now and feel like it was written yesterday, despite its 10 years of great success. It’s very much a universal and time-spanning conceit, and a miracle bit of text. I’ve never read anything like it before or since,” Schmitz said.

“First and foremost is that this story is so wonderfully and beautifully told that the course of the story takes you by the hand and leads you through various stages and forms of grief, and delivers you safely out the other side with, I don’t like using the word catharsis, as it’s far more detailed and miraculous than just a good therapy session.

“It delivers you back out into the world with questions, but also with great joy and beauty.”

The goal is that anyone who wasn’t familiar with Porter’s book will have close to the same experience as Schmitz did when he read first read it - “We are attempting to mine precisely the same power and magic.”

Porter is coming out for the show, but Schmitz doesn’t feel the pressure to impress. “I don’t need to impress anyone,” he said. “I don’t have that. The rest of my life, I have to be an impressive father for my daughter, for my employers I have to turn up on time, I suppose.

“That’s half the reason I ran away with the circus at a young age, is that I don’t give a f—k.”

Not a literal circus - he doesn’t have the physical flexibility - but the decision to be an artist. He does, however, have artistic flexibility, and a hunger.

At the Sydney Festival in January, Schmitz with two friends, actors Ewan Leslie and Brendan Cowell, staged their play, Hamlet Camp, about three thespians in rehab trying to shake the Bard’s Danish prince.

When it was announced before Christmas, the piece didn’t exist. “It proved to us, it reminded me what it was like to be in my early 20s when I was doing a lot more independent theatre and living on a futon in a squat, was that you don’t actually need a theatre company,” he said.

It’s a contentious statement, but, at its core, it’s also true and it speaks to an almost spartan reverence Schmitz has for the form.

“You don’t need a director, you don’t need a writer, actors can actually solve anything, and I’m not saying that with any hubris, I just know it to be true.

“You can put on a play without a director, but a director can’t put on a play without actors. All you need is a milk crate and a human person, and you’ve got a play. You probably need at least one audience member, otherwise it’s an exercise in madness.”

Hamlet Camp was a hit, and it also reminded Schmitz he can always create his own next job. “It’s a little harder when you’re older, who’s going to look after the kid or pay the rent, but you can still do it.”

His book, The Empress Murders, had started life as a play he wrote 10 years ago because Schmitz was keen to explore gothic horror, a genre that was far more prolific in theatre in the Victorian era. It was wildly ambitious – “30 characters and set on a f—king ocean” and underpinned by the terror of colonialism – the kind of production that main stage companies baulk at.

It was produced by the now-defunct Tamara Rock Surfers company at the Bondi Pavillion to “a modicum of success”. He lamented that no commercial main stage theatre has ever taken one of his plays and joked that he might have to write something with just two characters on a couch, or a one-man piece about Tony Abbott.

The Empress Murders has quite a lot more moving parts, and even then, people had asked him if maybe it was a novel. First, he wrote it as a screen treatment and shopped it around, but no one was biting.

“This was five or six years ago, and my chum Tim Minchin said, ‘I think it’s worthy of screen adaptation’ but he said, ‘unfortunately, you’re going to have to write the novel for someone to option it into a screen (project)‘. He said that’s just show sh-t works.

“That’s so backwards but Timmy is very savvy when it comes to the nexus of entertainment and business, and he’s probably right. No one wants an unsolicited screenplay set on a 1920s ocean liner from an unknown screenplay writer. But if the novel does well, then maybe they’d go, ‘huh, maybe someone should put this on screen’”.

No one said showbiz wasn’t absurd, and maybe Schmitz could put to paper all the bizarre encounters he’s had over his career.

“Maybe that’s the second novel,” he said, maybe joking, maybe not. “A little memoir, a little slender airport thing. Just a couple of salacious anecdotes, and I’m out.

“It would probably sell through the roof.”

Grief is the Thing with Feathers is playing at Belvoir St Theatre from July 26 to August 24.