The Lane Cove Theatre Company, a local theatre group in a suburb of Sydney‘s bougie North Shore, have been running a production of the award-winning play ‘Holding The Man‘ since August 11.
The play, which is based on a moving memoir by Timothy Conigrave published in 1995, chronicles the 15-year love between two Australian men who meet at their all-boys school in 1970s Melbourne.
As such, it’s become an important piece of Australian queer culture, beloved by audiences for its raw portrait of love, loss and the AIDS pandemic.
It’s also, sadly, become an easy target in these tumultuous times in the lead up to the plebiscite on marriage equality in Australia, and it’s led to some extremely ugly shit.
Last night, during the second-to-last performance of the play, audience and cast members’ cars had their tyres slashed. The damage was strictly limited to cars parked in the theatre’s car park; the other cars on the street remained unscathed.
It’s not the first time the production has come under fire from anonymous cowards bent on intimidating the cast and crew – earlier this month the company’s posters advertising the production were torn down from places where they usually remained without issue.
Police are investigating the vandalism, which left 12 cars damaged and a number of punters stranded after travelling some distance to attend. They’ve said that they’ll be investigating “all motives including motives of bias“.
Local MP Trent Zimmerman had this to say about the incident:
And the theatre company certainly aren’t taking it lying down, having started a GoFundMe to raise money to repair the cars and reimburse audience members who had to find accommodation in the area because they couldn’t get home.
But attacks like this are meant to frighten, and no-one could blame the members of the theatre group, or their audience, for being rattled. One cast member told the ABC, “It certainly leads you to believe that somebody was targeting us.”
Impressively, the group remains defiant, saying in a Facebook post today:
Our president Lochie Beh spoke to the ABC today about last night’s incident. At Lane Cove Theatre Company we publicly condemn the actions taken against our audience members’, cast and crew members’ property in protest against the content of HOLDING THE MAN. We cannot condone or allow such vitriolic attacks to occur, especially in a suburb that has long upheld itself as welcoming and inclusive.
There is no room for hate in Lane Cove.
A “civil and reasonable debate”, indeed. Thanks a lot, Malcolm; you’re doing us all a solid.
