BWW REVIEWS: HOLDING THE MAN, Trafalgar Studios

After breaking box office records in Australia with four sell-out seasons, and winning several prestigious awards, Holding the Man arrived in the West End with some very high expectations to satisfy. The play, based upon Timothy Conigrave's autobiographical novel, opened in Sydney in 2007 and impressed audiences with its sensitively humourous telling of a heartbreaking tale. The subject is Timothy's relationship with the love of his life, John Galeo, and both men's experience of suffering from AIDS.

The two main characters are played in the West End by the actors who originated the roles, Guy Edmonds and Matt Zeremes. However, the rest of the cast, who each play a large variety of characters within the play, are new additions and include several star turns. Jane Turner from Kath and Kim and West End mainstay Simon Burke (La Cage Aux Folles, The Sound of Music) play characters ranging from parents to school friends. They are supported by Anna Skellern and Oliver Farnworth, promising younger actors from TV and theatre.

Holding the Man is very much a play of two halves. The first is a progressively light-hearted look at a teenage gay relationship, yet the second takes a much more sombre turn as Timothy and John receive the devastating news that they are both HIV positive. The same audience members who were crying with laughter during the first act, left the theatre wiping away tears of sadness two hours later.

The play is staged very creatively, with a simple set which is cleverly used to represent every setting from a school and a bedroom to a car and a hospital room. The challenges of actors playing multiple characters, or the same characters at various times in their lives, are overcome in similarly simple yet ingenious ways. Timothy, for example, wears his school's colours throughout the play, changing clothes as the years (and fashion trends) pass but always wearing the same red shoes. It is fitting that the production should avoid any unnecessary complexity as Holding the Man is at heart a simple, classic story of love and loss.

One negative point about the production is that Timothy is a far more engaging and sympathetic character than his boyfriend John, but this is perhaps inevitable in an autobiographical play told from Timothy's perspective. It would have been beneficial for the character of Timothy to expand upon what made him fall so helplessly in love with John, and for the audience to have more insight into teenage football player John's realisation that he had feelings for his male friend. Other interesting aspects of the story are also not explored as fully as they could be, such as how the boys' peers reacted to their homosexual relationship in a time somewhat less accepting, or at least less informed, than today.

Whether or not the audience members fully engaged with both of the lead characters, they were certainly moved by their story, and its basis in reality made it all the more affecting. It was no surprise to see that the standing ovation at the end of the play was near enough unanimous.

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