Holding the Man

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