An hour before he stepped on stage for the first performance of his one-man show, Jack Holden felt he shouldn’t be there. Cruise tells a euphoric, gut-wrenching, music-filled story set during the 1980s Aids crisis. “As a queer storyteller, there’s an immense pressure of diving into this important and harrowing period of time to do it justice,” Holden says, a look of concern on his face. “I was born in 1990. What do I know about the 80s?”
When he was in his early 20s, Holden began volunteering for Switchboard, a listening service for LGBTQ+ people in need of someone to talk to. One of the calls he got early on was from an older man who phoned on the anniversary of his partner’s death. “They had both contracted HIV in the mid-80s, when there was still no effective treatment,” he recalls. “They thought they had been given a death sentence and decided to spend all their money and go out with a bang.”
The story stuck with him for years. When lockdown hit, he finally sat down to write about it. “The original caller is so anonymised that they would never know it was them,” Holden clarifies. After leaving Switchboard, he heard similar stories of people who were diagnosed early on in the crisis, ran up huge credit card debts – and then survived.
In 2012, Holden played young Albert in War Horse in the West End; he went on to perform in Johnny Got His Gun at Southwark Playhouse in 2014 and Ink at the Almeida in 2017. Most recently he was in Ten Percent – the English-language remake of Call My Agent! – as the infuriating American assistant Kevin (“It was an embarrassment of riches, that cast”). Cruise is his debut as a playwright, and binds together the story he heard as a volunteer with his own experience as a gay man. “It’s about the inheritance of the timeline,” he says.
When he started writing the show, he messaged John Elliott, composer from the Little Unsaid, who he’d worked with before. Supported by Shoreditch Town Hall during the pandemic, they threw bits of the play together, underscored by 80s synth music. “It grew into this odyssey through Soho,” Holden explains, “this hero’s journey structure. I wanted him to visit the islands of the Odyssey, and those islands were Soho’s clubs.” He spoke to older gay friends who were in their 20s in the 1980s and trawled through books and online forums that talked about the turnover of bars and clubs in Soho during that period. “People would go, ‘That was rubbish, I hated that place,’ which was all useful texture. It wasn’t as clean and commercial as Soho is now. It was really grotty and dangerous outside of that square mile.” He and Elliott sent a demo to the producer Katy Lipson, who ran with it. Cruise was one of the first West End shows to be staged as London’s theatres reopened after the lockdown. It went on to receive an Olivier nomination for best new play and is now returning to the West End, this time at the Apollo theatre.
Growing up, Holden remembers the vivid absence of anyone talking about HIV and Aids. “It feels like only recently it’s starting to sink in that if you have HIV and you get diagnosed and you get put on treatment, your life is completely normal,” he says. “It’s a livable chronic condition. The idea then was that if you were to turn out to be gay, that would be a risky, scary life.” He is immediately warm and bouncy on our call, but at this he seems to shrink a little. “That played into my understanding, of thinking, ‘I don’t want to be gay, because it’s a lonely, dangerous life’.”
But in Cruise, Holden writes a narrative that defies this line of thinking. It doesn’t shy away from the loss, but neither does it wallow in the fear. He wanted it to be “loud, jubilant, life-affirming”, fuelled by desire and the will to keep on living. The heady joy of the show sprung in part from the music of the era. “I have a fetish for 80s music,” Holden laughs. “It was music that came from nothing and defined communities defiantly. We always talk about it as the kind of music you can dance to and cry to.” With the show now transferring to the heart of Soho, he hopes some audience members might roll out of the theatre and head straight to clubs such as Heaven or Freedom.
One night, a man waited outside the stage door to chat to him. A little shaky and tearful, he pointed in the direction of Theatre Royal Drury Lane, a short walk away, saying he’d been a dancer there in the 80s. “He said three of the dancers in the show contracted HIV and died of Aids-related illnesses,” Holden remembers, soberly. Like the original caller, the man just wanted to share his own story, hoping Holden might be the right person to listen.
Cruise is at the Apollo theatre, London, from 13 August to 4 September.
