Interview with Jack Holden, Cruise

Interview by Emmie

Nominated for the 2022 Olivier Award for Best New Play, Cruise is making its regional premiere at HOME Manchester this summer, from 20 July - 12 August.

The play which is performed and created by Jack Holden, tells the true story of what should have been Michael Spencer’s last night on Earth. This brilliant piece of work “incorporates the vibrancy of queer culture, the pulsating vibrations of the music and a tribute to veterans of the AIDS crisis”. It’s no surprise that I loved this production in its online form during the pandemic and thrilled more audiences will continue to see Cruise.

In the run up to its regional premiere, we interviewed Jack himself to find out a little bit more!

Congratulations on the return of Cruise, how does it feel to be continuing its journey to Manchester this summer?

Thank you! I’m so excited to bring back Cruise for the third time. And it’s even more exciting to bring the show to new audiences in a brilliant city, whose LGBT+ scene and musical history chime perfectly with the themes of the play.

Let’s start at the beginning for you, what drew you to writing as your professional practice?

I trained as an actor at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and spent a few years going from acting job to acting job. But I soon realised I wanted to have a bit more input in the creative process of making a play. So I applied for a place on the Royal Court Young Writers Programme, got in, and started writing alongside my acting. It took a while for any of my writing to be remotely good! Cruise was written in the first lockdown, between baking banana bread and reading The Artist’s Way. In some ways, the conditions of lockdown were what I needed to be able to fully focus on writing the play.

What stories inspire you the most as a writer?

I have such a wide range of tastes. I read as much fiction as I do non-fiction, I’m inexhaustibly curious, and I’m always looking for stories in everything I see and read. But, ultimately, I’m an old romantic, so love stories really inspire me. In fact, stories that move me in any way really spur me on to create my own art that, in turn, moves audiences. I think the greatest gift a writer can give their audience is to move them.

Where did Cruise come from and how difficult was it to develop this as a solo show, especially as you had to initially contend with the pandemic as well?

The story at the centre of Cruise is based on a phone call I received when I was volunteering for Switchboard, the LGBT+ helpline. A man in his 50s called up to tell me about his youth. He’d moved to Soho as a young man, discovered the gay scene and fallen in love. However, in 1984, he and his partner were both diagnosed with HIV which, at the time, with no effective treatment, was a death sentence. So, they sold the flat, spent all their money and partied like it was the end of the world. His partner died in 1986, and he doubled down on his hedonism.

However, fate extended to him a second chance — he survived until medication came along and went on to live to a ripe old age. It struck me as an intensely bittersweet story — to be given your life back, but with nothing in it to make it worth living. The story stuck with me for years and, when the pandemic came along, it started to reveal itself in my mind as a solo show. Given it’s a big show with about thirty characters, I don’t know why I decided to make it a monologue! But a combination of being locked down alone, and wanting to theatrically express the connection of gay men through time led me to the form of a solo piece.

What are the challenges of performing in a solo show?

I have to be honest here and say that it’s technically a duet — on stage with me is composer and musician John Patrick Elliott. His original electronic soundtrack underscores my monologue, driving the whole thing forward with a sumptuous mix of floaty strings, euphoric synth and phat beats. His music does so much of the work for me — setting location, filling out characters, supercharging the emotion of the piece.

Having said that, I have to speak all 15000 words each night and it’s a real athletic event! I have to live like a monk whenever I’m performing the show. The toughest part of performing it is probably the very beginning — it’s a lot for the audience to take in, so I’ve got to make sure the first 15 minutes is really clear. If I do that, the rest of the show is a blast!

Is the finished product of Cruise as it is now different from when you first did it?

Every time we bring the show back we make slight changes. It’s a pleasure to get chances to revisit the piece and to make refinements each time. The entire creative team and I have been working on this show on and off for three years so, as everyone becomes more experienced, the show enriches. Having said that, it’s still the original show that got nominated for the 2022 Olivier Award for Best New Play!

Why is a story like Cruise important to be portrayed in a live performance?

Just as we were about to announce Cruise the first time, Russell T Davies’ It’s A Sin landed on Channel 4. I worried that our exploration of the AIDS crisis would get overshadowed by his. However, I then realised that there is always space for a plurality of interpretations and extrapolations when it comes to such seismic events — on stage and on screen. The AIDS crisis is such a huge part of gay history — I’m cautious not to keep exhuming the trauma of the past, but it must absolutely never be forgotten. Cruise is an elegy for those we lost, a tribute to the survivors, and a call for defiance even in the darkest of times. The liveness of the piece is what makes it so intense and so moving.

The music for this production is from the 80s - how is this an important layer to the piece?

As I was writing Cruise, we weren’t allowed to gather in groups inside or outside. I remember going on a walk one day and passing a church where a congregation was singing and swaying to some modern worship music. And I felt so overwhelmingly jealous — why were they allowed to gather with their community and dance and sing, but I wasn’t allowed to do the same on the dance floor with my LGBT+ community?

The rules were the rules, and I didn’t contest them. But it did motivate me to write a piece celebrating the beautiful, important and transcendental feeling of dancing with complete abandon to very loud music. When making the show, I said to John Patrick Elliott that I wanted the whole thing to have a pulse, to build to an enormous crescendo like the very best club DJ sets. John more than rose to the challenge, and between us we selected some brilliant existing songs to anchor the show in the heady heights of the 1980s.

For those who haven’t seen Cruise or heard a lot about it, what can they expect?

Cruise is a mile-a-minute musical odyssey; it’s a moving, hilarious, heartbreaking ode to a lost generation; it’s a 90 minute tour-de-force full of kaleidoscopic characters, breathless twists and turns, and some absolutely killer tunes!

If you could develop the story differently, is there anything you would like to develop even further?

I’ve created a bunch of larger-than-life characters, some of whom I’d love to explore in their own spin-off shows!

What’s next for Cruise?

After Manchester, we’re hoping to take the show to other UK cities, back to London, and across the pond to New York. And we’re also developing Cruise into a feature film!

Cruise, written by and starring Jack Holden, runs at HOME, Manchester 20 July -12 August, Box 0ffice: 0161 200 1500 https://homemcr.org/

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