I went to see a play yesterday at the Opera House called Holding the Man. I had originally wanted to see this last November when it first played at a small theatre but it sold out so fast that I wasnt able to get tickets. There was a 2nd season in March but without thinking I ended up booking it for the same night as the Mardi Gras and as we had a friend in town specifically for the Mardi Gras we had to give them away. Luckily they announced a 3rd season and this time at the Sydney Opera House which was a nice setting. All 3 sold out.

I hadnt seen a play since I was in year 11 or 12 and watched Shakespeare's The Tempest at the Belvoire in Sydney. I'm not a Shakespeare fan but it did have Cate Blanchet in it and she was awesome.

Holding the Man was also awesome. The acting was brilliant and the story has you in stitches at some points and with wet eyes at others. It doesnt hurt that the two main actors were oh so cute. The story starts with two 15 year old school boys, one a drama student and the other the highschool jock, and follows their 15 year relationship through the late 70s and the 80s and ends with the ravages of HIV/AIDs in the early 90s. The story is autobiographical and so punches some real weight because of its reality.

I have been reading up a bit on it and read an interview with the playwrite and he touched on how the time distance between now and the peak of the AIDs epidemic allowed him to be able to write the play with a comic edge and a focus on the relationship and not just on the political overtones which would have dominated it if it was produced earlier. He also mentioned the Grim Reaper ad shown here in Australia in 1987 and until he did I had completely forgotten about it. I was only 5 when it started showing but I have a definite memory of it. I didnt know what it was about at the time but it definitely scared the hell out of me.

Someone has uploaded it on youtube:

Dont let this detract you from the play but do watch it for the message it relays and think of the context - it was shown in 1987?!

There is talk of interest from other cities around the world so if it ever makes it to your town I definitely urge you to go see it. It was based on a book which won the 1995 United Nations Human Rights Award for Non Fiction which is available in the States and Canada as well.

(Actually I just discovered it is already scheduled for performances in San Francisco September through November this year). If  you are in SF go see it.

I'll let a review speak for it as it does it better justice than I could:

Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/news/arts-reviews/holding-the-man/2006/10/26/1161749228028.html

Holding the Man

Stephen Dunne, reviewer
November 13, 2006

Tommy Murphy's adaptation of Tim Conigrave's memoir is an act of urgent remembrance - and the story of two people in love.

Matt Zemeres and Guy Edmonds in Holding the Man.
Picture: Janie Barrett

Review

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.

Conigrave (Guy Edmonds) falls for John Caleo (Matt Zeremes) at high school and they are, mostly, a couple until death. Their lives are skilfully theatricalised and biographically clear: for Tim it's GaySoc at uni, NIDA, acting, Soft Targets (the first Australian performance work to deal with HIV/AIDS) and other theatre work. For John, training as a chiropractor and opening a practice. For both, a relationship, and then diagnoses and telling friends and family (the other coming out) and the grim inevitability of blood tests and decline.

The adaptation makes the love of these two men, and the world they lived and died in, completely real. Brian Thomson's nicely messy, actor's mirror design and Michael Agosta's costumes are evocative, and beautifully functional, while Basil Hogios's sound and Stephen Hawker's lights are theatrically efficient and temporally accurate.

David Berthold's direction plays fully with the theatricality of a work that's set, at least partially, in a theatre. The entire space is used. There's a sharpness of pacing and a richly rewarding attention to emotional detail.

Jeanette Cronin, Nicholas Eadie, Robin McLeavy and Brett Stiller play everyone else (48 characters by my count) in a bravura display of ensemble skill and sharp delineation.

Edmonds and Zeremes are superb, with an unaffected directness and tenderness.

There's a famous slogan from that time: "knowledge equals power". It still does, but knowledge isn't just safer sex and treatment regimens. It's also knowing how the past helps prevent recurrence.

Murphy, Berthold and the cast's tribute to Caleo and Conigrave is compelling, wrenching and essential. I laughed, and I wept. History's like that.