The Canberra premiere of a classic Australian play by Queanbeyan-raised Tommy Murphy is first on the schedule for ACT HUB in 2023.
Murphy adapted Timothy Conigrave's posthumously published 1995 memoir Holding the Man in which Conigrove told of growing up gay in Melbourne in the 1970s and his long and sometimes fraught relationship with John Caleo, whom he met at school.
Both died from complications of AIDS, with Conigrave succumbing shortly after he completed the book.
The book won the United Nations Award for non-fiction.
Since its premiere in Sydney in 2006, Murphy's Holding the Man has had professional productions around Australia as well as in England, the US and Italy - and there's one slated for Argentina.
St Edmund's College alumnus Murphy also wrote the screenplay for the 2015 film adaptation.
"A new production is exciting to see," Murphy, 43, said.
Murphy said he enjoyed collaboration and was always eager to experience new stagings of the work - the most recent being in Melbourne earlier this year - and would be in contact with Everyman producer- director Jarrad West.
While Murphy has tweaked the play over the years, the core of it has remained the same: a life-affirming story of love and loss.
Murphy said Conigrave, an actor and author, was "a real truth teller" and "a writer who spoke with a really biting, incredible honesty".
The playwright honoured that candidness in his adaptation while employing devices and techniques - actoes playing multiple roles, asides to the audience, puppetry - to tell the story in a new medium, embracing its theatricality.
"I never got to meet Tim," Murphy said, though they had some things in common - "It is certainly challenging to be a gay kid at a Catholic school" - even if they grew up in different eras.
Conigrove came of age in the 1970s when the gay liberation movement was burgeoning and the scourge of AIDS would soon ravage the world. While Murphy came of age at a better time - more acceptance, more effective treatments for AIDS - he said there was still quite a way to go.
"I knew of the book but I hadn't read it," Murphy said, but on receiving the commission from Griffin Theatre Company he threw himself into the 18-month process of creating the play.
"One of Tim Conigrove's special powers is that he was a very funny writer," Murphy said. That sense of humour, which Murphy carried over into his play, brought a lighter side to the story.
Murphy's other works include the play Strangers in Between, which toured to the Q, and more recently the drama series Significant Others ("It's been released by ABC iView now").
He is working on another adaptation, of Nevil Shute's novel On the Beach, for the Sydney Theatre Company.
- Holding the Man will be on at ACT HUB from March 22 to April 1, 2023. See: acthub.com.au.
