There is something quietly radical about a production that strips away every theatrical crutch and dares its audience to simply feel. No set. No costume changes. Just two actors in shorts and t-shirts, barefoot on a bare stage – and the accumulated weight of centuries of love that ‘dare not speak its name’.
Jake Stewart’s Hold Me, Hold Me, Hold Me is structured as a series of intimate vignettes, each one a world unto itself: an aspiring playwright in love with an actor; two boys preparing for a Schoolies trip; a male witch on trial by his childhood friend in Puritan New England, or a man marrying his beloved’s sister, the closest he will ever legally, socially, safely get. The conceit is elegant – the same two souls, meeting and almost-meeting across time, across continents, across the impossible distances that history has placed between men who love men.
What makes this work so beautifully is the writing. It is poetic without being precious, shifting in register and rhythm to boldly conjure each new era – the clipped formality of pilgrim speech, the sprawling drawl of young American farmhands, the raw vernacular of contemporary Australia. Each scene feels genuinely native to its moment in time and yet the anguish running beneath them is identical. That pain is the through-line. That tender longing is the whole point.
The two performers, Callum O’Mara and Wheeler Maurer, are extraordinary. With no costume, no scenery, nothing but an embodied shift in posture, accent and language, they become someone entirely new at the top of each scene. It is technical work of real precision, but it never feels like a demonstration – it feels fully inhabited for us. The transitions between vignettes are marked by a live solo violinist, whose sparse, mournful phrases function both as punctuation and as emotional permission: let this one go before you receive the next.
The framing device – the same lovers at the beginning and end of their story, which open and close the play – is a knowing touch reminding us that this is a story being told deliberately, with intention and love, by someone who understands what it must have cost those who went before. The ones who lived it silently, from the shadows.
Leaving the theatre, the feeling is not quite sadness and not quite relief. It is something bittersweet, more like gratitude – for the relative safety of the gay community now, for the writer-director’s refusal to look away from all those centuries of concealed, aching love and for finding language equal to the weight of it all.
As a straight cis woman, as an ally, as someone who loves excellent theatre and beautiful acting, I urge you to go.
Hold Me, Hold Me, Hold Me is a touching and profound exploration of love, and a reminder that love belongs to everyone.
To book tickets to Hold Me Hold Me Hold Me, please visit https://events.humanitix.com/holdmeholdmeholdme.
Photographer: Alan Robert Hopkins
