The Kurtzian nature of his delusions, and the naked terror on Tim’s face as he interviews him, echo through the film. He and cinematographer Germain McMicking have fulfilled this aim in almost every scene of Holding the Man.Ī great example of this is Luke Mullins’s electrifying portrayal, in one short scene, of a dying Aids sufferer, fading into dementia. Armfield has said that in directing film, as with theatre, his aim is to hold a space for the actors to do the work, in this case to show what it was like to be these people at these times. This has terrible consequences, but their love is undying. The story is simplicity itself: Timothy Conigrave and John Caleo fall in love as teenagers at school in 1976, are parted and rejoined more than once, both eventually falling ill with Aids. His screenplay for this film, with Neil Armfield’s direction, takes a further step and adds the cinematic dimension of simply being. Tommy Murphy’s play of the book in 2006 resolved Conigrave’s matter-of-fact but poignant text into its essential elements: love, humour, pain, religion, and acting.

It had its UK premiere at the Trafalgar Studios in the West End in 2010.Timothy Conigrave would surely have been delighted that Neil Armfield’s film of his much-loved book Holding the Man (1995) is being released at exactly the moment that Tony Abbott is conducting his farcical elephant waltz around the issue of same-sex marriage. Tommy Murphy's play Holding the Man was first performed in Sydney, Australia, in 2006. Read more the temptations, the jealousies and the losses – until the only problem that love can't solve turns up to part them. Against the odds, Tim and John develop a relationship that, for fifteen years, survives everything life throws at it – the separations, the discriminations. The course of teenage love rarely runs smooth, but it is a white-water adventure if you are secretly gay in an all-male school in 1970s Melbourne with a crush on the captain of the football team. Based on the award-winning memoir by Timothy Conigrave, and adapted for the stage by acclaimed playwright Tommy Murphy, Holding the Man tells a remarkable true-life love story that speaks across generations, sexualities and cultures. Still, despite the odds, Tim and John become close and for fifteen years their relationship survives everything life throws at it - until the only problem that love can't solve turns up to part them.

The course of teenage love rarely runs smooth, but it is a white-water adventure if you are a gay boy in an all-male school in 1970s Melbourne. Description for Holding the Man Paperback.

Holding the Man by Timothy Conigrave