Seventeen years since it first appeared on Belvoir’s stage, Tommy Murphy’s devastating love story Holding the Man returns this month, marking 30 years since the death of original author Timothy Conigrave from Aids-related illness, aged 34.
Conigrave’s memoir, published in 1995, holds a special spot within the gay Australian psyche, one of the first – and still one of the most emotionally potent – portrayals of living and dying through the Aids crisis in this country. Murphy’s play, too, had a massive impact: in the 12 months following its premiere at Sydney’s Griffin theatre in 2006, it transferred to Sydney Opera House and then Belvoir, eventually becoming a film.
The story has the enduring quality of a fairytale: two soulmates find each other, rather improbably, at an all-boys school run by Jesuits in 1970s Melbourne – and then die together, 15 years later, as the result of a virus transmitted from one to the other while making love.
Back on stage under the direction of Belvoir’s artistic director Eamon Flack, the tale has lost none of its potency, and gains some from being performed by queer cast members – a sign of hard-won progress. As Murphy’s play reminds us, in a scene set at NIDA (where Conigrave trained as an actor), we’re not so far from a time in which actors were told to stay in the closet if they wanted a career.
Playing Tim and his true love John Caleo are the suitably boyish Tom Conroy (Tell Me I’m Here) and Danny Ball (The Italians), while a supporting cast of four (including Sydney theatre stalwart Rebecca Massey and Rake star Russell Dykstra) juggle a host of supporting characters in a production that leans into the “make-believe” essence of theatre with on-stage changes, lurid costumes and big wigs.
Massey and Guy Simon (White Fella Yella Tree) are in danger of stealing every scene they’re in, but it’s ultimately Conroy’s show; he has perhaps never been better cast than as the irrepressible, incorrigible, boyishly charming yet unfailingly frank Conigrave.
Murphy’s script seems to have been streamlined since its premiere, with exposition pared back into a lean two-hour, two-act structure. Before the interval, we see the relationship blossom; after it, we see it weather illness and then death.
If it sounds tragic, it is – do not under any circumstances forget tissues – but it’s also horny and funny and full of joy. It’s as much about the gift of love and life as the injustice of losing it.
In transposing the story from page to stage, Murphy jettisons some of the horniness but dials up the comedy, which Flack and his cast take full advantage of. An extended scene involving a teenaged circle jerk was one of several that had the opening night audience in hysterics.
If anything, the production could probably stand to forgo some of those big laughs, or at least pause to let some of the more devastating beats breathe. (The audience is barely given time to process a powerful second-act moment in which Tim and John grapple with their freshly delivered HIV diagnosis as if it were a death sentence.)
There are enough Easter eggs for gays, Sydneysiders and theatre tragics to make seeing this show with a home crowd particularly delightful, but not so many that it will alienate a broader audience. For all of us, it’s a still-timely reminder of the devastating effect of dehumanising society’s most vulnerable; neglecting our most marginal. That Tim and John and their peers lived and died through a decimating epidemic was tragic; that they had to do it without the support of government, society and often even parents and siblings, is unconscionable – cruel.
Flack’s production holds space for the grief that the play taps into and invokes the salutary power of joy. The set design (by Stephen Curtis) and in-the-round seating, with a section of the audience on stage, is a potent metaphor for the experience of Tim and John and generations of queers past and present: somewhere between a black hole of grief and a disco ball of bliss, we somersault, surrounded by community.
Holding the Man runs at Belvoir St theatre until 14 April
