QUEANBEYAN-born playwright and screenwriter Tommy Murphy comes very close to being what professional hype would call “a local legend”. 

He is one of Australia’s most prolific playwrights, with his most recent effort being “Packer & Sons” and a swag of other accolades behind him. His six-part TV series, “Significant Others”, a thriller starring Alison Bell, and Rachael Blake, is currently streaming on ABC TV iView. 

He’s also been commissioned by the Sydney Theatre Company to do a stage adaptation of Neville Shute’s end-of-the-world novel “On The Beach”, to be directed next year by STC chief Kip Williams. 

All the while, it is Murphy’s stage and screen adaptations of the Tim Conigrave memoir “Holding The Man” that has brought him the greatest fame, and it’s still going strong, with the announcement that it will be the opening production for the ACT Hub’s 2023 season, directed by Jarrad West. 

It’s been a busy year for him, as I found when we caught up by phone to Sydney. It’s a casual chat between familiars, for even as a young boy living in Queanbeyan then studying at St Edmund’s College, he was heavily involved in the local arts community – I even once judged him performing in a scene from “Othello”, for which he won a trip to London’s Globe Theatre. 

Murphy is happy that he’s allowed to travel again. One of his plays will be staged in Florence during December and he hopes to go. 

Earlier this year, he was able to spend time in Los Angeles with his brother, Padraic, another member of the extraordinarily artistic Murphy family (brother Marty is a comedian and film identity, while sister Kate is one of Australia’s leading visual artists) who works there as a researcher providing content to TV production and film houses. 

Murphy was in LA for family time, not to seal a deal in the film industry and says his mind was still focused on “Significant Others”, a six-part drama broadcast filmed by Fremantle Media for which Tony Krawitz directed all six episodes. 

It’s a story about a family dealing with shock and loss, starting with a vanishing, where they are drawn back to their crumbling home in what Murphy calls “a kind of purgatory” before the police can give them answers and help them rebuild. 

The story is close to home for Murphy, who has suffered several shocking bereavements in recent years, including the unexpected death from a sleeping disorder of his own partner. 

He wrote “Holding The Man” for the stage in 2007 and the screen in 2015. It is to him “a very NIDA [National Institute of Dramatic Art] story.” Murphy had studied directing at NIDA and Conigrave was an acting graduate from the institute, so some of the action is set there, though the plot centres on the love story of Tim and John Caleo, who both succumbed to HIV-related illnesses.

The then director the Griffin Theatre, David Berthold, knew of the memoir by Conigrave and after a production of Murphy’s play “Strangers in Between”, thought this would be a good commission for Griffin and a nice theatrical segue, for Conigrave had served on the board of directors there and had trod its boards.

“In the story, Tim puts a temporary end to his relationship with John to go to NIDA, so in finding the plot it made sense that Sydney’s theatre became a part of the stage adaptation… it was the theatre that was the basic idea,” Murphy says, adding that recreating the lives of Tim and his lover John was “almost like summoning ghosts – but the theatre is a good place to be haunted”. 

The play was a runaway success, with six runs between 2007 and 2008, a season in London in 2010 and more productions to follow in San Francisco, Auckland, Los Angeles and Chicago. 

“Adapting the play to the screen was a very different undertaking, so I had to find how to structure the story in a different way, but all the lessons I learnt from having seen an audience watching the play served the film,” he says. 

“Of course, the visual imagery possible in film confronts audiences in a different way, but that said, with a live audience and a stage, people regularly fainted and gasped… it’s a different understanding.

“Turning somebody’s life into a play is an unusual privilege and responsibility. I had to continue to help tell Tim’s story in a new medium and it is hard to be sensitive to people who loved Tim and John – the power of it is breathtaking.” 

“Holding The Man” ACT Hub, March 22-April 1.