Holding the Man - A Personal Reflection

Last week, a film crew landed in my living room. I was to be interviewed for a documentary called John and Tim, being made by Waterbyrd Filmz, about the lives of John Caleo and Timothy Conigrave. Conigrave wrote Holding the Man, a candid and magical memoir of his 15-year relationship with Caleo.

I was being interviewed because I directed the theatrical adaptation of the book. In 2005, as Artistic Director of Sydney's Griffin Theatre Company, I commissioned Tommy Murphy to adapt the memoir. By November 2006 we had it onstage at the Stables Theatre. We remounted it six times, including at the Sydney Opera House, Belvoir and Melbourne Theatre Company, and most recently in 2010 in London's West End. There have been productions in San Francisco and Auckland, with others coming up. For such a particular Australian story, it's a remarkable trajectory.

Conigrave was born in 1959 and went to Xavier College in Melbourne, an elite Jesuit school (also attended by Bill Shorten and Sir Les Patterson). Tim, who wanted to be an actor, fell in love with John, the captain of the football team. They declared themselves boyfriends in 1976. Tim went to NIDA while John became a chiropractor. Despite unrelenting obstacles, they remained together until John's death on Australia Day, 1992.

Holding the Man is one of the great love stories, and is unsurpassed as an account of the devastation caused by HIV/AIDS in Sydney during the '80s and '90s. If any book can be guaranteed to make you cry, it's this one. It does so, I think, for a range of complex reasons, not the least of which is that it describes a rare love with irresistible candour.

It's a book with a special place in Australian life. It was published by Penguin in February 1995, just a few months after Conigrave's death on 18 October 1994, a month short of his 35th birthday. The book has never been out of print and is, I think, up to its fourteenth reprint. It's been published in Spain (2002) and North America (2007). It won the United Nations Human Rights Award for Non-Fiction in 1995 and was listed as one of the '100 Favourite Australian Books' by the Australian Society of Authors for its 40th anniversary in 2003. In 2009, it was nice to see Penguin publish it in its $9.95 Popular Penguins orange stripe series. My guess is that it's one of the most 'passed on' of Australian books. I've handed over more copies than I can count. 

In many ways, it's a simple book. It's written in disarmingly straightforward prose, without literary pretension of any kind, and might be read simply as a 'growing up in the '70s' story. The book is full of references to music, films and TV programs of the period. It's a lot of fun and very evocative.

The interview encouraged many memories to the surface. 

I remembered sitting with Tommy in Beare Park just below my apartment in Sydney's Elizabeth Bay. We'd just finished a terrific season at Griffin with Tommy's first play on a professional stage, Strangers in Between. I wanted to find something else for him. I asked whether he thought adapting Holding the Man was a good idea, and whether he thought he was the person for the task. I thought he was, but wanted him to say it. To my mind, Tommy had the sensitivity, sense of humour and unguarded theatrical imagination I believed necessary for any stage version. Sitting on the park bench, Tommy told me he'd heard of the book, but had not read it. The cover - a blurry photograph of two partially naked men - made him dismiss it, he said. 

I asked him to read it.

He did so, and then wrote me the most astonishing email. He described at length the experience of reading the book on a bus journey to his parents' home in Queanbeyan, and getting to the final chapters with his head on his boyfriend's lap, sobbing. He described how reading Tim's life was like reading his own. Tommy had no experience of HIV/AIDS - which made some of the book a startling revelation - but Tim's travels through student theatre and NIDA and work at Griffin Theatre Company tuned with many of Tommy's experiences. Tommy felt a profound need to tell the story for another generation. He was 25, twenty years younger than Tim would have been, and felt a mission.

I remembered my first encounter with the book. In early 1994, I was offered  a job at Sydney Theatre Company. I was arriving from a similar position at Queensland Theatre Company, and so needed a place to stay for a while until I found somewhere permanent. My friend Nick Enright offered me a room in his house in Newtown. Nick had been Tim's acting teacher at NIDA, and they were now good friends. At this time, while I was settling myself into Sydney and its flagship theatre company, Nick would often visit Tim in hospital, helping with the shaping of the book. Tim's health was failing, Nick told me, so there was a need to work quickly. I remember typed copies of draft chapters sitting on top of Nick's piano. I would read these loose A4 pages, intrigued by the accounts of growing up in Melbourne and life in Sydney theatre not many years past. I would be amused at Nick's furious corrections of Tim's punctuation. IT'S = IT IS!, the thick pencil would often scream. 

I remembered when I first read the published book. It was on the day it hit the bookstores. That morning I was to board a flight to Paris with a group of Australian playwrights for an STC exchange with the Comédie-Française. I knew the book was out that day, so quickly found a copy in a Potts Point book shop to read on the plane. 

I read it in one go, with unexpected and uncontrollable sobbing over the last 50 pages or so. In Singapore's Changi Airport, I think it was, I passed it on to playwright Karin Mainwaring. This was the first of probably a dozen copies I would pass on over the years. It's remarkable how much people want to share the book. Interestingly, many read it in one go on long journeys, just as Tommy and I had done in different decades.  

I remembered when we got the rights to adapt the book. Nick Enright had been Tim's literary executor, but on Nick's death in 2003 that role passed to Nick's literary executor, David Marr, who then devolved responsibility for Conigrave's work to Conigrave's sister, Anna. I wrote to her. Anna didn't know us at all, so (I'm told) she asked the actor Victoria Longely for advice. Victoria was a great friend of Tim's - they were at NIDA together, lived together for a period, and some of her can be found in the character 'Veronica' in Holding the Man. I imagine that Victoria's advice would have been crucial to Anna's decision making.

As fate would have it, Victoria was someone with whom I had a close relationship. I had directed her several times at STC in the 1990s, and she worked as an assistant director on a STC show of mine. Our first project together was in early 1995, just six months after Tim's death, when she performed in my production of Brad Fraser's Poor Super Man. For Veronica, being part of this show was very much a private tribute to Tim. Tim died of an AIDS-related illness, and Brad's play was a deeply affecting Canadian work that was, in great part, a homage to those who had died in similar circumstances. I remember one day Victoria coming into the rehearsal room thrilled that Holding the Man had won its United Nation Human Rights award. It was a roller coaster time.

Victoria died of breast cancer in 2010. Thanks, Vic, for putting in a good word x

I remembered visiting the Conigrave home in Melbourne. All of the Conigrave family had been terrifically supportive leading up to the production, and indeed ever since, but Tommy and I felt the need to meet Tim's mother and father before they saw the show. They were coming to opening night, and the thought of meeting them for the first time in the foyer was just too silly. We realised that we had a responsibility to introduce them to the experience in a more respectful way. They would, after all, not only be seeing themselves on stage, sometimes in scenes that never quite happened that way in either the book or in life, but would also witness the death of John and be reminded of things that one could never adequately predict.

It was a delightful Sunday afternoon. Tim's younger brother, Nicholas, also met us at the family home, but he soon left us alone with Dick and Mary Gert. I think we spent maybe four or five hours in their company, over some lovely glasses of Riesling. It was magical being with them, in their home. After such a long period of research and thinking, we both felt that we knew the house - the phone, on which Tim and John had so many furtive conversations, was still there; a photograph of Topolino, the Italian Mickey Mouse and an important memento in Tim and John's relationship, was on the fridge; down the corridor, we imagined the sunroom into which Tim would sometimes sneak when John stayed over. Sitting in the living room, where so many important family discussions and arguments took place, was a moving melding of fact and memoir, of past and present.

Gert shared how she had read the book in one sitting late one night, in the chair where she now sat. She showed us photographs, and paintings Tim had made. She told us how over the years people have written letters, simply looking up 'Conigrave' and 'Brighton' in the phone book, then popping a letter in the post, hoping for the best. She keeps shoe boxes of these letters, testaments to the power of the book and to the impact her son's life has made on so many. I suspect these letters have had a powerful healing effect over the years. 

Dick was more circumspect, as men of that generation often are, and indeed he reminded me of my own father. Yet he was clearly proud of his son, and charmed us. He saw the play several times - an experience that must have been particularly challenging, since he told us that he had never read the book. Dick passed away in 2009. In The Age newspaper, in a moving gesture to marriage equality, the funeral notice read in part:

Loved father of Timothy (dec), Anna and Nicholas.
Loved father-in-law of John (dec), Anthony and Hilary.

I remembered how, when we left the Conigrave home, full of inspiration and contentment, Tommy and I stood on a corner searching for a cab. From out of the shop behind us floated Depeche Mode's Just Can't Get Enough. This was an important song for Tim and John, and was Tim's funeral march in St Canice's Catholic Church in Elizabeth Bay, just around the corner from where I'd had that first conversation with Tommy. The song closed the first act of our production. Tommy and I looked at each other, said nothing, but our eyes welled. What were the odds?

Neither of us are superstitious, but time and time again through this project we had felt Tim's encouraging hand. On the first day of rehearsals, out of the blue, a package arrived from James Waites: CDs of three hours of an interview Jim had recorded with Tim in January 1993 as part of an HIV oral history project for the National Library. We had known nothing of this interview. It was as if Tim's voice demanded to be heard that day. There were many other times when Tim said hello.

I remembered the first preview. It was a nervous occasion. This was a deeply loved book, and if we got it wrong we might never be forgiven. But the foyer was full of good will and all seemed to go well. As the applause eventually faded, a young man sitting behind me tapped me on the shoulder: "Hello. I think you've all done a great job. I'm Anthony Caleo, John's baby brother".

I really didn't know what to do. Our only contact with the Caleo family had been a letter from Anna, as Tim's literary executor, letting the family know, as a matter of courtesy, that she had granted permission for a stage adaptation of her brother's book. There had been no reply. We saw no need to contact the Caleos ourselves. It was Tim's book were were adapting, not John's. So Anthony's gesture had great meaning.

I asked if he would like to meet the cast. I went backstage and let them all know about our very special visitor. For some hours, Anthony shared stories. He later struck up something of a friendship with Matt Zeremes, the actor playing his older brother. Three days later, Anthony posted this on a blog that fielded one of many online discussions about the book and play:

Hello there everyone, I am John Caleo’s baby brother Anthony. I just wanted to say thank you for all your kind words as this story truly represents one of the most beautiful depictions of love and devotion in the modern era.

I went and saw Tommy Murphy’s adaption of ‘Holding The Man’ at the Griffin Theatre on Friday 4th November and to my great relief, it was the most amazing live theatre experience I had ever been fortunate enough to attend. The characters were so accurate it was like I had been transported back 20 years as John’s favourite little sibling. I remember the days when I used to go to Sydney to visit John in Rose Bay in my school holidays, life was fun, John was wonderful and Tim was entertaining. All of the fondest memories about John floated through my mind whilst I absorbed the play, trying to reconcile why the most beautiful people are always taken from us. Unfortunately, it was incredibly difficult to witness his death in the play as it was portrayed so wonderfully and sensitively by David Berthold’s cast.

I will miss John forever and I feel complete after seeing this work of art. I now have closure.                                  

I remembered when the play found a wider audience. Early on, the audience was mostly gay men. I guess that was to be expected, especially in Sydney. The book was famous in the gay community, and as soon as we announced that we were staging it, they bought up most of the tickets. After a performance one night, a group of older gay men, of Tim's generation, stood and hugged in a circle on the stage. In silence, they remembered friends and partners they had lost in the horror of that time. In the seats beyond, a young couple, a man and woman in their 20s, looked on in wonder and terror.

Before long, and particularly by the time the production transferred to the Sydney Opera House, the audience grew even more diverse. For a great many people, gay and straight, male and female, young and old, the story touched a well. For some, the theatre became a place of remembrance and reclaiming; for others, it was a place of wide-eyed discovery; for others still, it was a place to hold a loved one.

I never met Tim, but as the film crew packed up their equipment and left me alone, I remembered how close we had become. We had several friends in common, had stood and worked in many of the same places, had entwined our lives in ways I could never have imagined. I have several boxes marked 'Holding the Man', containing drafts of scripts, research material, letters from people affected by the production, cards, photographs. These are some of the physical remnants of a special endeavour. But in some private rooms of my heart, those places of retreat reserved for times of need and longing, I hold memories that never fail to repair me, for they sing to the miracle of unconditional love. 

Tim and John