Cruise, Duchess Theatre, review: this new play is as searingly honest as It’s a Sin

Pre-Covid, the Duchess Theatre in London’s West End was the home of The Play That Goes Wrong – the height of escapist, slapstick silliness. It will be again from mid-June, but by way of getting the party restarted, here’s something fresh, surprising and substantial: a self-performed debut play by Jack Holden.

Holden has been bubbling under for a while; his stage credits include the soft-hearted lead (Albert) in War Horse. He now deserves to be the toast of the town, thanks to this solo tour de force, which grips like a vice as he whisks us back to the darkening Soho of the 1980s. Though it might seem counterintuitive to recommend an evening that revisits the Aids epidemic, and charts its ravaging of London’s gay community – just as we’re emerging from the pandemic, too – the thrust and theatricality of Holden’s 90-minute monologue are life-affirming.

Now 31, he was inspired by the reminiscences shared with him by callers to Switchboard, an LGBTQ+ helpline, where he first volunteered eight years ago. When Covid struck, his thoughts returned to what he’d heard, especially to a call with a middle-aged man who’d contracted HIV in the early 1980s, watched his partner succumb to an Aids-related illness, and resolved, assuming that he wouldn’t survive, to party on amid the sadness of countless deaths and funerals.

Directed by Bronagh Lagan, Holden gives us an arch self-portrait of himself as an affable, clueless kid, fielding all manner of dodgy calls before getting drawn into the confidences of “Michael”. Jumping between personae, he shifts into the latter’s more confident Cockney boots to walk along the Old Compton Street of bygone times – one generation merging with another.

We’re introduced to a gallery of eccentric characters, and – without being too explicit – forbidden goings-on in insalubrious locales. The narrative hurtles from sexual awakenings to a yearned-for oblivion, as Holden’s bereft Michael dances wildly at the gay nightclub Heaven, calling out the names of the departed. It being 1988 at this point, there are ecstasy pills to be had – and on the horizon, salvation in the form of antiretrovirals.

As with Russell T Davies’s televisual monument to the Aids era, It’s a Sin, and Matthew Lopez’s stage epic, The Inheritance, the distance in time allows some nostalgia to creep into this elegy for young lives. Holden’s remarkably astute second-hand account has its comic flourishes, but never gets too cosy: for all its physical stylisation, I’d say it catches the vulnerability and impressionability of being young in the homophobic 1980s better than It’s a Sin.

He’s abetted throughout by a pulse-quickening, period-pastiche electro soundtrack (courtesy of the dextrous keyboardist John Elliott). The nocturnal set, with its movable but slightly scrappy metal structures, leaves a little to be desired. But the writing often dazzles as brightly as the hanging neon strips: “We burned the candle at both ends… no, we threw the candle, holder and all, right into the hearth!” What a line; what a find.

Until June 13. Tickets: 0330 333 4810; cruisetheplay.co.uk