CRUISE is based on Jack Holden’s personal experiences volunteering in his youth at the London Gay Switchboard Helpline during the 1980s — and he deploys a particularly effective device to segue the audience into that hedonistic lost realm. One clumsily-handled call catapults us to Soho during its heyday and a time in which the AIDS crisis has only just begun to creep into the wider consciousness.
Jack Holden in Cruise at the Apollo Theatre. Photo Pamela Raith.