A powerful review of 'Holding the Man'

I've just read a glowing, touching, and powerful review that I wanted to share with you, of the stage adaptation of Holding the Man, Timothy Conigrave's acclaimed and devestating memoir about love and loss during the first, terrible years of the AIDS crisis.

Written by the gay journalist, critic and novelist Stephen Dunne, it's a deft and beautiful piece of writing in its own right:-


"It is easy to forget, to allow the memories of the relatively recent past to slide away to a possibly helpful distance.

Australia's experience of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and '90s is thus ancient history, and so much of that time is gone: a time of the dead and the dying; vigil shifts at ward 17; watching brilliant and beautiful men sliding into garbled dementia; polite efforts to avoid funeral scheduling conflicts; two full pages of obits in the Sydney Star Observer; anger and love and screaming horror at the waste of so many lives. Surprisingly easy to let all that go.

Tommy Murphy's adaptation of Tim Conigrave's memoir is an act of urgent remembrance, an unflinching, devastating, moving and funny reanimation of that awful time. It is also the story of two people in love."

You can read the full review here, in the Sydney Morning Herald (from which the above photo, of Matt Zemeres (left) as John, and Guy Edmonds (right) as Tim, is taken - picture: Janie Barrett).

I never knew Tim, but I was lucky enough to see two of his plays performed at the Malthouse Theatre a few years ago, the delightful and romantic Thieving Boy, and Like Stars in Your Hands. Both made me weep, while Holding the Man reduces me to tears of joy, then of wracking grief, each time I read it.

Reading Stephen Dunne's review of the play makes me want to fly to Sydney to see this production more than ever...