CRUISE

By Diana Simmonds

February 22 2025

CRUISE, Fruit Box Theatre with bAKEHOUSE Theatre at KXT on Broadway, 15-22 February 2025. Photography by Abraham de Souza

As you may have read in the theatre’s blurb and other publicity, Cruise, by Jack Holden is an Olivier Award nominee for Best New Play (2019). Having finally caught up with the production at KXT on its final day – an extra matinee performance – my first question was: if this play was only a nominee, what won the award?

Glad you asked. The winner for Best New Play was Life of Pi, which unless you’ve been under a rock for decades, you’ll know was a bestselling novel by Yann Martell, then a $600 million-at-the-box-office movie by Ang Lee, before an adaptation for the stage by Lolita Chakrabarti. How is it that an adaptation of a novel can be considered a New Play – best or otherwise?

The other nominees in the category were 2:22- A Ghost Story by Danny Robins, which had its world premiere run at the Noel Coward Theatre – and was not an adaptation. Then James Graham’s Best of Enemies – a Young Vic world premiere before West End transfer – and not an adaptation. As neither play has been picked up by a Sydney producer as yet, there’s no way of knowing how good they are, but one of the three – including the brilliant Cruise – was robbed by an adaptation that should not have been nominated in the category.

So … the Fruit Box production: performed non-stop in just under two hours by Fraser Morrison is a dazzling tour de force, flitting between a range of characters of all ages and stages. The key narrator is naive young Michael – volunteering on a gay helpline while still wet behind the ears but eager. Morrison morphs back and forth between those he talks to on the phone, having escaped his Medway hometown for Soho, and the vivid gay (male) life of the second half of the 20th century and those he meets.

There’s a fey old queen who still drawls in Polari, there are nights on Hampstead Heath, or in the cottages of the city and, later there are the clubs and pubs culminating in the ultra dance world of Heaven.

As is vividly portrayed by Holden – who loosely based the play on his experiences – it was a time of hedonism and sexual freedom. It came out of the prosperity of “Swinging London” after the illegality and dour constrictions of post-war, stitched-up 1950s Britain. As such, it’s a joyously graphic evocation of Soho life of the 60s and 70s in all its exhilaration and outrages. We thought we would be free and unencumbered by the past, and for a while that was true.

Holden wrote the play during the COVID lockdowns of the second pandemic in living memory. The first was HIV/AIDS – the one that, at first, seemed hellbent on taking the brightest and smartest. (It finally targeted straight women and mainly those of sub-Saharan Africa, but that’s another story.)

Cruise is a history play, a global warning, an expression of love and understanding, a love story for the ages, and an expression of all that’s best in humanity. Directed by Sean Landis with great understanding of the period and its people, the other members of the creative team are integral to its success. In the dual role of production and sound designer, Chelsea Wheatley turns the KXT traverse into an abstract of the many lives we watch, while the soundscape is a virtual second character playing alongside Michael et al. Lighting designer Tom Hicks makes moments of consequence and beauty, and accent/dialect coach Linda Nicholls Gidley adds the icing on the cake of Medway glottal stops, received posh, and a bona go at Polari. Finally, movement director Jeremy Lloyd choreographed Morrison’s non-stop moves and dance around his Soho world.

Word is that this painfully short season is likely to get another life at another theatre before too long. Let’s hope so because in Fraser Morrison a new star is born, and in Jack Holden’s writing there’s so much to savour it cries out to be seen more than once.