Holding the Man by Tommy Murphy (review)

Near the end of act 1 of Holding the Man, the character of Tim asks his teenage lover, John, to marry him. After a pregnant pause, Tim dissolves into a fit of laughter at the utter ridiculousness of the proposal. This is, after all, 1970s Australia, when the concept of marriage equality was as distant and exotic as the antipodean continent was to the rest of the Western world. Even today, LaBoite Theatre Company’s production of Australia’s most iconic gay love story strikes a resonant chord, as gay marriage continues to be venomously debated in the conservative state of Queensland and HIV infection rates rise alarmingly among Australia’s gay male population under age 30.

Written by Tommy Murphy, Holding the Man is the 2005 adaptation of Tim Conigrave’s 1995 memoir tracing his twenty-year relationship with John Caleo. Narrated by the character of Tim and relayed in episodes of lyrical memory, the play unfolds over two acts, from the couple’s meeting until death. Love begins between the unlikely pair at Xavier College in Melbourne, where Tim is a lively, overly dramatic theatre geek and John is the handsome captain of the “footy” team. In fact, the title of the play comes from the game of Australian-rules football, which defines “holding the man” as a transgression that incurs a penalty. For Tim and John, their initial penalty comes in the form of oppression from a society with concrete normative expectations, and in both the memoir and the play, the final penalty comes as the tragic deaths of both men from AIDS-related complications after a capricious stab at the game of a partnered life.

Although the play’s narrative is set primarily in the disco-drenched carnival of 1970s gay liberation and the dour 1980s, the company successfully employed the Brechtian concept of historification to link the past and present as a form of political commentary. Tim, the main character, was presented as a fabled and uniquely Australian “larrikin” figure by using Brechtian conventions of narration and expositional commentary. Loosely defined as a mischievous and nonconformist though charmingly charismatic youth, the larrikin is commonly seen as a character embodying a distinctly Australian form of heterosexual masculinity. At LaBoite, Tim was transformed into a sort of queer Mack the Knife for a modern Australian audience, although notably without an interventional resolution at the conclusion. I was struck by the fact that the production challenged a traditional definition of the archetype, bravely inviting a new queerer reading of the larrikin as a postmodern national icon. Director David Berthold drew upon other Brechtian elements in the acting, metatheatricality, setting, and staging. Using an ensemble cast in multiple roles, he staged the play without a fourth wall, with fragmentary though highly symbolic costumes and set pieces to represent changes in location, as well as the passage of time.

Combining the artist/jock binary with the real Tim Conigrave, who was a trained actor and passionate about the theatre, Berthold’s metatheatricality provided the conceptual and aesthetic lynchpin of the performance. His presentational staging allowed the audience to stand outside of the narrative, forcing us to consider the emotional stakes of the narrative without becoming overwhelmed by its tragic elements. Berthold cast six celebrated actors (Jerome Meyer, Alec Snow, Eugene Gilfedder, Jai Higgs, Helen Howard, and Lauren Jackson) as an ensemble embodying dozens of characters who seamlessly transitioned among gender, age, and sexuality through precise though fluidly gestic movements. The production was a lively game of visible dress-up that signposted the passage of time with camp-infused period garments and accessories. The tongue-in-cheek use of wigs designed by Micka Agosta, for example, was particularly effective in portraying the humorously outlandish hairstyles of the 1970s and ’80s. Passing time was also marked by Basil Hogios’s sound design, which relied heavily upon period pop anthems, from Donna Summer to Depeche Mode. This convention successfully contributed to the Brechtian nature of the production by embodying what the...