Are you man enough?
A chi più debb’io mai l’intensa
voglia
Sfogar con pianti o con parole mester,
Se d ital sorte ‘l ciel, che l’ame veste,
Tard’o per tempo alcun mai non ne spoglia?*
[To what purpose do I express my intense desire
with tears and sorrowful words when heaven, which clothes my soul,
neither sooner or later relieves me of it?]
Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564)
Holding the Man is tributes all round.
Timothy Conigrave's tribute to the man he loved for more than
half of his of his short life and a tribute by the Griffin Theatre
Company to Conigrave himself who was an early member of the company
working with them on the play Soft Targets, the first Australian
theatre work to deal with HIV/AIDS. This current staging is the
sixth of the play and one of Griffin's most popular since Michael
Gow's Away in 1986. I adored Away when I first saw it
(at Playbox which morphed into Malthouse where Holding the
Man is playing) and like Away this play synthesises so many
people's grief into its fabric.
Conigrave’s
highly personal and widely loved memento of the love affair that
consumed half of his short life has become one of the great Australian
love stories. Like Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis,
but in reverse. Where Wilde accuses his lover, Holding the
Man is Conigrave’s apology to the man he feels he hurt
so deeply and fatally. Tommy Murphy’s stage adaptation is
very faithful to the book, sometimes fusing many scenes and people
into one but using the dialogue directly and keeping Conigrave
(Guy Edmonds) as narrator, often addressing the audience directly.
The original script, including scenes not eventually used in the
final version as acted here is published by Currency Press. It
is fascinating how readily Conigrave's written words transfer
to acted ones.
As Conigrave Edmonds speaks as though he is thinking
out loud most of the time in keeping with Conigrave’s impulsive
thinking. This matter of fact way of addressing the audience still
works and works very well, his character established immediately
and yet he still carries the play through to the end when, alone,
the recollection is over and Conigrave is in his present and speaking
the "Dear John" letter, he erupts into tears.
Director David Berthold and the cast avoid melodramatics.
Matt Zeremes is excellent as the doggedly loyal Caleo while up
to fifty other characters are played by Jeanette Cronin, Nicholas
Eadie, Eve Morey and Brett Stiller. Cronin is hilarious as a masturbating
schoolboy, Conigrave’s dotty but doting mother and then
devastating as Caleo’s stoic mother as she sits at her son’s
deathbed. As both Caleo’s and Conigrave’s parents
Cronin and Eadie are outstanding, Eadie in particular superbly
creating Conigrave’s and Caleo’s father with masterful
dignity. Even characters appearing only briefly are there because
they did or said something that was pivotal in Conigrave’s
life and Murphy’s script or the actors never challenge his
versions of the events and characters. Like the book, the play
is remarkably frank on all counts, not just the sexual material.
The many scenes covering fifteen years follow like
a series of sketches. The dorkiness of their school years is hilarious,
the long lost (thank God!) tradition of school holiday shows in
shopping centres, school plays, everything about theatre that
Conigrave loved is beautifully evoked culminating a brilliant
NIDA (National Institute of Dramatic Art, one of Australia's major
drama schools) send up with the ludicrous theatre games that reveal
the petty attitudes and jealousies of the students more than their
potential. But Conigrave says that NIDA was all he talked and
thought about and writes an affectionate and hilarious scene where
Conigrave and Caleo go driving in a car mimed in a perfect pastiche
of 1980s street theatre as practiced by most theatre students.
Puppetry complements the action at three key points.
The play opens with a puppet enactment of the 1969 Moon landing
and ten year old Conigrave’s first gay stirrings and Neil
Armstrong's famous Moon dialogue hilariously modified. Later,
with his awareness of his HIV status and as he researches Soft
Targets a puppet figure stalks the stage. When Caleo's illness
overtakes him Conigrave leads him, puppet like by his hospital
tubes, toward his bed and finally a puppet figure assumes his
dying body. The set is simple, a high black back wall flanked
by dressing room mirrors, emphasising the script like form of
Conigrave's book and the theatre he loved. In the second act,
when HIV/AIDS enters the story Stephen Hawker's lighting switches
to a chalky flatness and the huge black wall looms eerily. This
eclectic style is a Griffin Theatre hallmark.
Holding the Man is part of a continuum
of gay-themed dramas that emerged out of the AIDS crisis but reflecting
a change the attitude toward gay people that, in the scenes of
Conigrave's student activist period, the play includes. Homosexuality,
even in the eyes of the quickest to judge, teen-aged schoolboys,
is part of the human condition. The play carries less of the feeling
of Conigrave beating himself up with guilt. It is unbearably sad
to watch all the same but always true to Conigrave’s memoir
and memory.
Michael Magnusson
To read more of Michael Mangusson's theatre reviews,
check out his blog at
On Stage (and walls) Melbourne.
