AND NOW TO BED is the third in the Table Talk Trilogy commissioned and produced by one of Sydney’s most enduring and entertaining theatre companies, Subtlenuance.

Director Paul Gilchrist chose seven actors and paired them each with a writer. The writer then took a story from the actor’s personal experience and crafted it into a theatrical tale. The only brief given was to explore the concept of sexuality.

That done, Gilchrist curated the individual stories into a cohesive show, giving it theatrical shape and form.

As the great writer, Raymond Carver said, you have to know what you’re doing when you turn your life’s stories into fiction. You have to be immensely daring, very skilled and imaginative and willing to tell.

The will and the skill are certainly on show in this neat and nifty ninety minute show.

When it comes to sex, gender is on the agenda, of course, but so are history, politics, language, law.

There’s the physical, the romantic, the fantasy, the intimate, and the anonymous. All this and more is covered as these seven scribes and their progenitive performers present a poignant panoply of the pubic made public.

AND NOW TO BED is a uniformly fine ensemble piece from both writers and players, and begins with writer Con Nats’ parley of Paul Armstrong’s flirtations and fluctuations with straight and gay relationships.

Mark Langham’s script for Erica J Brennan’s brash performance enjoys a conjugal thrust and parry and the politically pitched Katie Pollack piece is robustly played by Eleanor Stankiewicz, the personification of the aphrodisiacal pull of political power.

Older audiences will find Jennie Dibley’s rendering of Margaret Davies’ script about first love and the perils and pitfalls encountered by the pre-Pill generation, especially women, particularly affecting, referential to the real and the romantic, pragmatically of the present but mindful of the power of memory.

The tag teams of dramaturg Donna Abela and performer Shauntelle Benjamin, scribe Melissa Lee Speyer and thesp Edric Hong and scripter Sarah Carradine and actor Richard Cornally cement this generously spirited septet into one heaving organic whole.

Kudos to producer Daniela Giorgi and the entire cast and crew of AND NOW TO BED, which will hopefully prove to be the sleeper hit of the Sydney theatrical season.

AND NOW TO BED plays the Kings Cross Hotel till March 22

For more about and now to bed, visit http://www.subtlenuance.com