Holding The Man, adapted by Tommy Murphy from the book by Timothy Conigrave, directed by David Berthold. Set design by Brian Thomson, costumes by Micka Agosta, lighting design by Stephen Hawker, composition and sound design by Basil Hogios. With Jeanette Cronin, Nicholas Eadie, Guy Edmonds, Eve Morey, Brett Stiller and Matt Zeremes. Melbourne Theatre Company in association with Griffin Theatre, Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse. Bookings: 1300 723 038

There are few more isolating experiences than sitting unmoved in an auditorium that echoes with muffled sobs. Critics are supposed to be carved of flint, so perhaps it isn’t surprising that I sat through Holding the Man with scarcely a flicker of emotion. But given the passionate responses this play has elicited, such indifference feels slightly disturbing. I didn't especially dislike it. I just didn't feel anything much at all.

I don’t doubt for a moment the reality of the feelings prompted by this show, nor the sincerity of those who made it. And it's clearly struck a chord in a wide audience: this MTC season is this production's sixth, after four hugely successful seasons in Sydney and another in Brisbane. Review after review, tribute after tribute, lauds its profound emotional impact. So what am I missing?


As theatre, Holding The Man seeks to touch a particular constituency – by which I don't mean the gay community, but a certain kind of theatrical audience. As I am clearly not within this constituency, I can't but feel that these impassioned responses are less to the play itself than to its subject matter, and are validated by a sense of its authenticity. Holding The Man carries the potency of witness reports: this is real, this happened to real people.

It’s a fine line – this assertion is also part of the emotional engine behind one of the most powerful theatre pieces I’ve seen, Ariane Mnouchkine’s Le Dernier Caravansérail – but too often work underpinned by these notions of authenticity can become a kind of emotional pornography. I’m not one who believes in art for art’s sake, but in things artistic I agree with Oscar Wilde’s observation that “in matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.”

Tommy Murphy's play is adapted from Timothy Conigrave's memoir of the same name, a much-loved text that for many Australian gays articulated their experiences of the early days of AIDS. Published after Conigrave's death, it tells the story of his turbulent 15 year relationship with his lover John Caleo, from their first meeting in high school, to Caleo's death in the early '90s. As Nick Enright said in a short piece he wrote on the book, "it documents some aspects of life in our community in two particular periods of self-definition (seventies liberation and the health crisis of the eighties)". Its adaptation to theatre can't help but be reductive, and director David Berthold is quite frank about what the play was to be: "We wanted the love story".

So Holding the Man recounts, through a series of episodic scenes, the story of the love between Tim (Guy Edmonds) and John (Matt Zeremes). John remained faithful despite Tim’s serial infidelities, which gave him the disease that ultimately killed both of them. Murphy adapts the book as a conventional bio-play, moving chronologically from their first meeting. Aside from Tim and John, all roles are doubled, with the other three actors between them playing more than 40 parts. Edmonds and Zeremes give appealing performances, but they are the only actors who can: the other performers can do little more than bounce around like cartoon characters, providing a kind of animated background to the story.

It’s written for a certain kind of theatricality, which incorporates puppets and physical theatre in a swift-moving, impressionistic narrative. Although it moves very slickly under David Berthold’s efficient direction, it’s the kind of theatre that always calls up for me memories of Theatre in Education shows in high school. Everything is directed towards moving towards the emotional climax, in a dramaturgy that sacrifices depth in favour of surface movement.

Much of the script rests on the dynamic of recognition: there are rather too many in-jokes about Sydney theatre, for instance. Or a snatch of Supertramp here, a reference to Inflation there, and voila! it's Melbourne in the '80s. Perhaps if I had read the original book, my imagination might have supplied some of the complexity so signally missing on the stage.

As it is, the play is almost a text-book example of how sentimentality can be used to obscure the very issues it claims to be exploring. I suspect this is another reason it left me cold. Unlike, say, The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer’s powerful and angry play about the early days of AIDS and its devastating impact on the gay community in New York, there is no sense that its implications go beyond the merely personal.

Like Tommy Murphy, Kramer employs a narrative that is clearly autobiographical, of a love story between two gay men (one of whom is a writer and who, presumably, ends up writing the play we are seeing). And it is written with a directness, anger and love that pulls no punches: it's an emotionally gruelling play. But Kramer also creates a critique of institutional bigotry and indifference which remains as pertinent now – in the new dimensions of the AIDS crisis in Africa, for example, which chiefly impacts on women and children – as it was back in the 1980s, when the main victims of HIV were gay men.

There is no such possible connection in Holding the Man, where complexities are largely airbrushed out in favour of an idealised romance that does everything but stick love hearts around the stage. For all its frankness about things of the body - the details of sex as much as illness - it has an air of Disney about it, a feeling that all complexities, paradox, difficulty and pain are absorbed into a consoling emotional orgasm.

On the other hand, no artwork need be more than it is. And there's nothing essentially wrong with tragic love stories with huge emotional climaxes: they are, after all, the very fabric of classical opera and epic poetry. Whatever the reason, the earth just didn't move for me.

Picture: Matt Zeremes and Guy Edmonds in Holding The Man.

Little Alison is still in reset mode. On Wednesday night she saw Lucy Guerin's Aether, a work of exquisite complexity and beauty, but can she find the words to describe it? (The audience is expected to shout out: "no, she can't!") It takes a certain answering complexity in the mind to respond to work, and for the moment - I live eternally in hope of tomorrow - TN has the aesthetic sophistication of a shoelace. This lack of creative brio must be why I find myself coming over all editorial. What the hell. It's Sunday, the newly cleansed house is sparkling, and I'm sure you've got a nice cool beverage by your elbow. Right then.

This week, for example, the Short and Sweet Festival is back again at the Victorian Arts Centre, apparently bigger and better than ever. Now, in blogland Short and Sweet has a controversial history. Some of you will remember the wrath visited upon Ming-Zhu last year, when she blogged as a participant in the 2006 season (Chris Boyd's useful summary here, my commentary on the commentary here, and my review of some plays here.)

Patrick White winner Patricia Cornelius is one of the participating playwrights this year, and she was in the Age last week doing the PR thing. Though I noticed Cornelius seemed to argue against the idée fixe that audiences now have the attention spans of the above-mentioned shoelace. (Wherefore the wowed audiences at Ariane Mnouchkine's six hour epic Les Dernier Caravanserail, I wonder? surely if theatre is considered exciting in itself, it doesn't have to be marketed as something that won't hurt for long? - but I digress...) It is this attention span that, it seems, necessitates such festivals, which provide "access" to the arts.

I have all sorts of problems with the word "access". For a start, in my experience the demand for "accessible" art usually comes from people like Andrew Bolt. I am all for community arts, an aspect of culture that was sidelined by the Australia Council's restructure under the Howard Government, which saw off the Community Arts Board and left institutions like La Mama struggling to carry the slack. But I'm hoping - given that S&S organiser Alex Broun has been very active organising arts policy forums for the new Labor Arts Minister, Peter Garrett - that S&S isn't seen as a model for a brave new accessible arts world, because I think it is, at best, harmless and, at worst, a way of seeming to support emerging artists while actually doing very little of substantial worth.

(Aside from good community theatre programs - of which I think organisations like Big hArt are a model - I actually think that the best thing that could be done for access to theatre would be to make tickets cheaper. In Paris, you can pay 10 euro to see Pina Bausch at the very comfy Théâtre de la Ville, whereas a ticket to The Madwoman of Chaillot in Melbourne will set you back almost $80. But again, I digress...)

The short play festival concept is at best a dubiously scattergun way of nurturing new work. But it's attractive in many ways - it's very feelgood, and it's cheap. Participants volunteer their services for a chance at the prize money, thus removing at one stroke the major problem in performing arts budgets: the wages bill. There's something strangely circular about it. As I said in my review of one of last year's shows:

There's a whiff of the MFA creative writing circle here, a phenomenon common in the US, where aspiring poets (for example) learn how to write poetry in an MFA program, are published because they have an MFA, and go on to become creative writing teachers who run MFA programs...a rather pernicious professionalisation, as many have suggested, which explains the smooth edges of so much contemporary American poetry. Short & Sweet has its own version - aspiring S&Sers can enrol for the Short & Sweet playwriting course in early 2007, where they can presumably learn how to write plays for the festival.

It's almost, as a quick look at the website will verify, a small industry, and it's expanding rapidly: there are now S&S festivals for dance and music theatre. On the face of it, as I said, it's mostly harmless. But if Short and Sweet is embraced as a way forward for theatre, I worry.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about at all.

What caught my attention in the Age was a comment by Patricia, where she talked about the "desperation" felt by many writers about the lack of outlets for their work. I don't argue with the desperation; we have all - those of us of literary dispositions - felt this at one stage or another. "There are so few avenues for people wanting to write for theatre now," she goes on to say, "especially with the exclusion of Australian work from our major theatres."

This is where I do a double take. Which major theatres "exclude" Australian work? Even the MTC, which is surely among the most backwards of the major companies in this area, has this year programmed new works by David Williamson, Joanna Murray-Smith and Justin Clements (it has a rather better record in previous years). I can't say I'm excited by the Murray-Smith/Williamson duet, but there's no arguing that it's new and it's Australian.

Cornelius is by no means the only person to say this - it's a common perception. The formation of PlayWriting Australia out of the two former bodies, the Australian National Playwrights Centre and Playworks, is a new attempt to address the difficulties playwrights face. There's an organisation mooted called Melbourne Dramatists which, aside from having the worthy aim of getting playwrights to talk to each other, aims to mitigate the prejudice theatre companies allegedly hold against Australian work. There are playwrights' conferences all over the map, there are workshops and masterclasses and competitions. Playwrights, it seems, need all the help they can get.

I do not doubt that it's hard to get new plays on, despite the support of champions of new writing like La Mama or Griffin Theatre, nor do I wish to dismiss the concerns of writers. But I will point out that it was ever thus. I only need to ask my husband, who is now approaching (or even in) his third decade as a full-time playwright, a "profession", if it so might be called, which combined with my own, means that we do not own a house, a car, shares in Telstra, a country estate or any of the other material accoutrements considered necessary for a comfortable bourgeois life. (Although we do own a lot of books, cds and dvds). And he's successful, accounting - according to the Australia Council anyway - for a quarter of Australia's entire literary exports.

Yes, there's no doubt that it's tough - though equally, it's tough for directors and actors and all those other parts of the industry that face the prospect of 90 per cent unemployment. But is it really as bad as claimed? Do major companies really ignore Australian work?

Robyn Nevin, former artistic director of the STC, addressed this head-on earlier this year. "There's been a perception out there that I've been unwilling to program new Australian plays. Obviously there have been new Australian plays that I've not produced. I've rejected them. Perhaps that's what has generated this criticism because the facts tell a different story."

In fact, says Nevin, the 2008 STC season includes seven Australian plays. "Forty-seven per cent of the plays done over my time here have been Australian," she says. "Thirty-five people have been commissioned and next year we're doing seven Australian works."

The company that gets most schtick for ignoring writers is the Malthouse Theatre. Rodney Hall was one of the first to accuse it of "abandoning" writers, just after the new team took over from Playbox in 2004, and it's been a constant bone of dissatisfaction ever since. The Playbox, the story goes, programmed playwrights, and the Malthouse doesn't. I've heard this so often that I think it's worth looking in detail at the facts.

The past three years' programming doesn't bear out this assertion at all. In 2004, the final Playbox year, the Playbox produced six new Australian plays, its total work for the year (the previous year, the Playbox presented eight). The following year, the new writer-free Malthouse put on, in a season of 11 works, seven new Australian plays - and I mean, plays, texts written for theatre - by Wesley Enoch, Tom Wright (two), Lally Katz, Patricia Cornelius, Margaret Cameron and Ben Ellis. Plus a production of Patrick White. There were seven plays- plus a literary adaptation - in 2006, as well. Since 2005, it's mounted new works by Stephen Sewell, Gareth Ellis, Michael Watts, Ross Mueller, Lally Katz, Tom Wright, Rebecca Clarke, Melissa Reeves and Peter Houghton.

It beats me how that is abandoning writers, although there's no argument that the Malthouse is programming a broader vision of theatre. But the perception that writers are ignored persists, despite the facts. Are writers simply responding to the fact that there are many more plays than stages to put them on? (And perhaps I have answered the S&S question above - is it a place for the overspill, a kind of valve to let the pressure off some dangerous cultural steam?) But it seems to me that these persistent complaints are actually part of a deeper and more complex conflict about the place of writers in contemporary theatre. Which is, actually, quite an interesting discussion.

But now I'm hot and I have to move my desk (only writers know what this means). So I'll leave it to others to tease that one out...