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.

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.

Against the odds, Tim and John develop a relationship that, for fifteen years, survives everything life throws at it - the separations, the discriminations, the temptations, the jealousies and the losses - until the only problem that love can't solve turns up to part them.

Tommy Murphy's play Holding the Man was first performed in Sydney, Australia, in 2006. It had its UK premiere at the Trafalgar Studios in the West End in 2010.

'Tommy Murphy is a bewitching playwright of startling originality' - Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton, Artistic Directors of Sydney Theatre Company

About the Author
Tommy Murphy is an Australian playwright best known for his stage and screen adaptations of Timothy Conigrave's memoir Holding the Man, which won numerous awards including Best Play at the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, an award he also won for Strangers in Between. Timothy Conigrave (19 November 1959 - 18 October 1994) was an Australian actor, writer, and activist. His major work, the autobiographical Holding the Man (1995), is the story of his 15-year love affair with John Caleo. They met as students at Xavier College in Melbourne; Caleo was captain of the football team and Conigrave wanted to be an actor. Conigrave finished the book shortly before dying of an AIDS-related illness. The book was published by Penguin Books in Australia in February 1995, and also in Spain and North America. It won the 1995 United Nations Award for Non-Fiction.

Reviews

'Fresh, frank and funny... a wrenchingly moving love story I defy anyone with a pulse not to relate to'

* Evening Standard *

'Compelling, wrenching... unflinching, devastating, moving and funny'

* Sydney Morning Herald *



Book Information
ISBN 9781848421080
Author Tommy Murphy
Format Paperback
Page Count 120
Imprint Nick Hern Books
Publisher Nick Hern Books
Weight(grams) 140g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 8mm