Holding the Man
At first glance, Tommy Murphy’s adaptation of activist and actor Tim Conigrave’s achingly beautiful memoir, Holding the Man, seems to have all the ingredients of a classic AIDS parable: young love defying the heteronormative status quo; young life cruelly stolen by a merciless disease. And yet, following its premiere by Sydney’s Griffin Theatre Company in 2006 – and despite a popularity with audiences that saw it transfer to the Sydney Opera House before becoming a film – this play suffered accusations of not doing enough to confront the political and social alienation that failed Australia’s earliest victims of the HIV/AIDS crisis. And this would arguably be true, if such ends were ever Conigrave’s, or indeed Murphy’s, intention. The biggest clue that those criticisms are off-target comes in the play’s closing seconds, as the audience is told of the memoir’s dedication – “For John” – a tribute to the man Tim Conigrave loved for more than half his life until John’s AIDS-related death on January 26, 1992 at the age of 31. In these two words, the truth of Holding the Man is revealed. This is not a political act in the same vein as William Hoffman’s trailblazing As Is or Tony Kushner's epic masterpiece Angels In America – plays that howl for justice, that hold a mirror up to the ugliness of society’s apathy, that pitch their dramatis personae as agents of change. Holding the Man is an honestly drawn lived experience – joyous, devastating, deeply intimate, but crucially, unbound