It was obvious from its debut season at Sydney’s Stables Theatre in 2006 that Tommy Murphy’s adaptation of the late Tim Conigrave’s memoir had the makings of a canonical work of Australian theatre.

That Conigrave worked at the Stables during the mid-1980s and instigated Soft Targets there – Australia’s first theatrical response to the AIDS crisis – made this raunchily hilarious and desperately sad rollercoaster of a play doubly poignant.

Revival seasons at the Sydney Opera House and here at Belvoir in 2007, proved that the play could move audiences just as hard away from its home ground. Seventeen years later, here we are once again. Does it still pack its punch?

Tom Conroy and Danny Ball in Holding the Man. Photo © Brett Boardman

Directed by Belvoir Artistic Director Eamon Flack (David Berthold helmed its premiere), this staging creates a powerful sense of community connectedness to the story and its characters – almost to the point of ownership. What Romeo and Juliet are to Verona, so schoolboy lovers Tim and John are to Sydney.

Flack stages the work intimately, with designer Stephen Curtis bringing the action into a three-quarter-round configuration with a...