In 2006 Eamon Flack auditioned to play Timothy Conigrave in the premiere season of Holding the Man at Sydneyâs Griffin Theatre Company.
To prepare he bought a copy of the book from which it was adapted: Conigraveâs devastating 1995 memoir about his 16-year relationship with John Caleo, which started when both were in high school in Melbourne and ended when Caleo died of an Aids-related illness in 1992. Conigrave would die just two and a half years later. âI read most of it on a plane to Perth and finished it sitting in a Ford Laser in a car park in Leederville,â Flack says.
He didnât land the role. Instead Flack left his acting ambitions behind and started working as literary manager at Belvoir St Theatre, where he is now artistic director.
âIn hindsight, I totally understand why I didnât get cast in it,â he says. âTimâs boldness, his compulsion to discover and explore his life, was quite remarkable. He gave himself freedoms that I never gave myself.
âReading the book, I started weeping really early on because here were two teenagers finding in themselves and in their world the space to love in a way that I had not.â
As Flack started his career at Belvoir, the stage adaptation earned the playwright Tommy Murphy the New South Wales premierâs literary and Australian Writersâ Guild award for best play, and the Philip Parsons young playwrights award.
Since its premiere season, it has been staged across Australia and internationally, including Londonâs West End, San Francisco, Auckland and Florence. And next month Flack directs a new production of Holding the Man at Belvoir, with his partner, Tom Conroy, cast in the lead role as Tim.
Itâs now almost 30 years since Conigrave died from Aids-related illness; and close to 18 years since the playâs debut. A film version, also adapted by Murphy and starring Ryan Corr and Craig Stott, came out in 2015, the same year a documentary about Tim and Johnâs relationship premiered at Adelaide film festival. As for the play itself: âA work as essential as this probably should have been revisited [by now],â Flack says.
I ask Flack and Conroy what itâs like to work together as a couple on a queer love story like this. They pause for a while, looking at one another.
âI donât really know,â Flack says. âWeâve never talked about it.â He laughs awkwardly. âYesterday was Valentineâs Day â that made it funny.â
Itâs not the first time the couple have worked together: Conroy featured in The Master and Margarita, directed by Flack, in November; in Flackâs adaptation of Henrik Ibsenâs Ghosts in 2017; and in Bertolt Brechtâs Mother Courage and her Children in 2015.
âI feel like [our relationship] doesnât really come into play,â Flack says.
Conroy says: âItâs good in that I feel very comfortable. And thereâs endless amounts of trust, but thatâs partly just because I trust Eamon as a director. [Our relationship is] obviously part of it, but not in a huge way.â
For The Master and Margarita, Conroy was a kind of âdramaturgical sounding boardâ for Flack, as they worked on the script at home after hours. For Holding the Man, the couple leave the play in the theatre at the end of each day. âWe go home and watch For All Mankind on television,â Flack says.
Thereâs been renewed interest from storytellers in the HIV/Aids crisis. It was explored in Rebecca Makkaiâs bestselling 2018 novel The Great Believers (since optioned by Amy Poehler), the acclaimed UK series Itâs a Sin in 2021, and, last year, the US screen adaptation of Thomas Mallonâs Fellow Travelers, and In Our Blood on ABC TV (Itâs a Sin creator Russell T Davies has described Johnâs death in the Holding the Man movie as âthe finest death sceneâ he has seen on screen).
Conroy first read Holding the Man when he was 16 and performing in a community theatre production of Jonathan Harveyâs 90s queer teen romance Beautiful Thing.
â[Holding the Man] was such an important story for me growing up,â Conroy says. âI was still coming to terms with being gay and it just completely devastated me.â
The book follows Tim and John through the giddy highs of first love. Thereâs a separation, a rekindling and, later, Conigraveâs unflinching portrayal of Johnâs illness. In Conroyâs words, itâs a kind of Romeo and Juliet story.
âThey had such a unique experience of falling in love at the age of 15, these two young boys, and that love carried them right through to their deaths,â he says.
Conroy recalls sobbing through the final 50 pages, devastated not just by the end of Tim and Johnâs relationship, but by the threat of Aids. âThere was a part of me that was definitely like, âOh, Iâm going to die of Aids. If I am gay, this is going to happen to me as well.â And that was very scary.â
Returning to the book 20 years later, he says, âhas made me think about my adolescence and how much the shame and fear around being gay was to do with what [a queer life would be like],â he says. âOne of the interesting things about the book is that itâs [primarily] a love story between two boys, and one of the obstacles is this illness that they get, rather than it being a story about how scary Aids is.â
In the lead-up to rehearsals, Conroy talked with friends about what their lives would have been like if they had come of age during the 90s.
âWe have this horrific hypothetical that we sometimes find ourselves falling into of, âWhat would have happened to our friendship group if weâd been [adults] then, and which of us would have died?ââ he says. âItâs such a horrible, impossible thing to think, but we all are really aware of how lucky we are to be alive when we are.â
Murphy also recalls the fear of Aids being drilled into young queer people when he was growing up. A lot has changed since then.
Last year the International Aids Society declared that inner Sydney â where the play is being staged â may be the first place in the world to eliminate Aids as a public health threat, with new HIV acquisitions reduced by 88% thanks partly to what Murphy refers to as âa little blue pillâ, or PrEP.
âThat said though, thereâs this lingering stigma that is so cruel and so unnecessary today,â he says. âThat fear is hard to shake. For a long time, we were told to be scared because that would keep us safe, and every sexual act had a feel of âthis one could be riskyâ. Thereâs no longer a reason for us to feel that fear, and yet still, today, people living with HIV so unnecessarily will have to combat that stigma.â
Murphy hopes that staging the play in 2024 will remind people that âprejudice is a recurring thingâ and prompt thought about the queer people who are âon todayâs frontlineâ.
âWeâre at a time where there is a rise in fear about queer influence in young lives. And a big part of the drama of Holding the Man is about the disapproval over young queer love. I feel like thatâs the reason to tell the story now.â