DIRECTOR
Presented by QUT Acting
The Loft, Queensland University of Technology, October 2026
Holding the Man is based on Timothy Conigrave's celebrated memoir of the same name, which won the 1995 UN Human Rights Award for Non-Fiction and was voted one of Australia's top 100 favourite books.
Tommy Murphy's stage adaptation faithfully captures the book's heart-wrenchingly honest portrayal of a fifteen-year relationship, but also succeeds in transforming it into a unique theatrical experience that is wholly his own. The play won multiple awards, including the 2007 Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting and 2007 Philip Parsons Young Playwrights Award, as well as having had seasons across Australia and internationally.
Rosie Armstrong: Mary-Gert/Bartender/Doctor One
Joel Davies-Sparks: Younger Tim
Theo Hughes: Dick/Derge/Lee/Franco/Waiter
Will Hutchieson: Older Tim/Richard
Yianni Paikopoulos: John/Neil Armstrong
Finnley Quinn: Marie/Rhys/Door Bitch/Harry/NIDA Teacher/Actor Three
Ava Ryan: Biscuit/Rose/Peter/NIDA Director
Dylan Spokes: Mission Control/Scarecrow/Woody/Theatre Director
Mackenzie Thompson: Jackie/Queen One/Lois/New Romantic/Doctor
Two/Actor One
Alice Vyse: Juliet/Eric/Queen Two/Dr Shepard
Additional Ensemble: Ella Marshall and Connor Watcher
Band
Miles Chapman: Piano and Percussion
Theodore Hughes: Cello and Bass Guitar
Finnley Quinn: Bass Guitar
Ava Ryan: Trumpet and Bass Guitar
Dylan Spokes: Drums
Alice Vyse: Singer and Guitar
Producer: Andrea Moor
Production Manager and Senior Staff Manager: Aaron Jeffery
Stage Manager and Assistant Director: Georgia Hollis
Assistant Stage Manager: Kathy Chen
Production Designer: Madeleine Barlow
Lighting Designer: Teegan Kranenburg
Costume Realiser: Summer Hsieh
Sound Designers and Composers: Annika Baclig and Harry Peters
Sound Supervisor: Morgan Francis
Choreography: Mackenzie Thompson
Vocal Coach: Rosalind Nugent
Head LX and AV: Will O'Shauhnessy
Photography: Stephen Henry
Directors Notes
There is something sacred about Timothy Conigrave’s memoir Holding the Man.
It’s not a book you discover on your accord. It’s one that is passed to you, especially as a queer Australian. Someone quietly hands you their own battered copy, looks you gently in the eye and says, “You should read this”. That is what happened to me in 2007. I’d only been out for a couple of years and still had so many questions and anxieties about who I was as a young gay man. The impact of Tim’s book was tectonic. It shifted my entire centre of gravity, not least because I was a theatre student at Monash University, the same place Tim had completed his undergraduate degree.
A year later, in 2008, I saw Tommy Murphy’s stage adaptation of Holding the Man on the Melbourne leg of its victorious tour around the country. And just as I had been with the memoir, I was utterly shattered by it. I sat in the theatre, on my own, collectively grieving with the rest of the audience for these two men I’d never met. As with every person in that theatre and every person who had read the book though, I felt I knew right down to my soul. We all sat together and wept for them, for the loss they had suffered and the life they had lived together.
That same year, I realised I wanted to be a theatre director. And I wanted to direct Holding the Man. It feels like every production I’ve directed since has been in preparation to do just that.
That’s the thing about Tim and John’s story. It feels personal to those listening, whether in the form of the memoir or the play or the film or the documentary. You feel, at every turn, that Tim is talking directly to you, sharing something deeply private and precious, because we too hold our own precious and private stories. And you want to be a part of it. A great act of adaptation, I feel, is less about its narrative fidelity to its source but its ability to capture the essential experience of it. This is what makes Tommy’s stage adaptation so remarkable and miraculous, its conceit of recreating the personal experience of reading Tim’s words, breaking down the wall between performer and audience, activating our imaginations and weaponising theatre as a collective emotional experience. You don’t feel like you’re “watching” his adaptation of Holding the Man any more than you feel like you’re “reading” Tim’s memoir. We become active participants in passing on their story, of a time past where the world felt like it was coming to an end, and the endurance of queer love and resilience in weathering such a catastrophe.
This notion of the collective experience, of passing on the story, the act of the telling of Tim and John’s story being at the centre of Tommy’s adaptation, led us to the way in which our company has chosen to present it. We’ve taken some bold swings with our staging, led this acknowledge Australian theatrical classic into a new direction, finding a new theatrical language for it, always listening to what it had to tell us—hopefully contributing to the evolution of this incandescent text. Thank you to Andrea Moor for trusting my crazy ideas and giving us all the creative space to test them out.
I’ve waited my whole career to direct a production of Holding the Man, but what makes this production so special is not its long gestation but the people I got to make it with. They care about this story and this play just as much as I do, but come to it with young, fresh eyes, looking at it through the lens of how much our understanding of queerness and gender and sexuality and identity has blossomed since the first production in 2006. They have poured their heart and soul and extraordinary talent into every moment of this production, taken every provocation I’ve thrown at them and bettered me at every turn. They haven’t made my production of Holding the Man. They’ve made our production of Holding the Man. Every moment working with them has been a joy.
I first read Holding the Man when I was 21, having experienced so little of the world. I’m now nearly 40, older and (hopefully) wiser and now seeing Tim and John’s story through new eyes, having experienced love and loss in many of the same ways they had. And the company of our production of Holding the Man are around the age I was when I read it. I can see in their eyes the same awe, the same passion, the same belief I had in the importance of this story, not just for queer Australians, but all Australians. Nearly two decades separate us, and yet we all feel the same pull to it, the same care, the same sense of responsibility and protectiveness.
In that spirit, we share the story of Tim Conigrave and John Caleo with you tonight, as best we can.
