Holding The Man

Tommy Murphy’s stage adaptation of Tim Conigrave’s compelling memoir dedicated to his great love, John Caleo, was premiered by Griffin Theatre in 2006.  The audience was a mess, laughing and weeping profusely, especially in the row with Tim’s family up from Melbourne; the book, the play and then the film were landmark successes.  Teenage sweethearts at a Catholic school, and together 15 years later, Tim and John both died from AIDS.

As in this Belvoir revival, the charged love between the boys is fundamental to the play’s power, and how it converts even in the 1980s all the teasing school mates and judgemental parents who witness it (except John’s Italian Dad, even to the end).  John (a quietly excellent Danny Ball) is the school’s footy captain, reserved and thoughtful (and in the AFL code there’s no Holding the Man!), while Tom Conroy plays the audacious and outspoken Tim who dreams of being an actor.

The boys negotiate families, sex and sleepovers, new gay culture in Sydney, a separation when Tim wants to make it with other guys then go to NIDA, reconciliation and John becoming a chiropractor, and then in 1985 both receiving early HIV tests.

Supporting the leads is a busy ensemble of four actors playing a kaleidoscope of other roles and hysterical walk-ons – Rebecca Massey, Russell Dykstra, Guy Simon and Shannen Alyce Quan.  We flip through hilarious vignettes in gay clubs and student activism, schoolmates masturbating, NIDA improvisation classes and later Tim, now ill, rehearsing his landmark  AIDS play, Soft Targets (at Griffin).  Those days of terror and grief, medical and social ignorance, and slow preparation for death, are so accurately realised in the last emotional quarter of the play.

Director Eamon Flack tells the story across Belvoir’s wide stage surrounded on all three sides by sofas by designer Stephen Curtis, used by both actors and audience. Intimate perhaps, but dead sightlines and unprojected words do the production no favours.  And while joyous, Flack too often flicks to camp vaudeville, the dramatic thread is frayed and some scenes lose focus.

Redeeming all is how Murphy stays true to the scenes of Conigrave’s memoir, to his blunt explicit language and almost pathological honesty which drives this tale from the start, especially with Tom Conroy at the helm.

Martin Portus

BUY THE PLAY SCRIPT HERE.

Photographer: Brett Boardman.