Cruise - Seymour Centre

Cruise – Seymour Centre

A dazzling act of transformation. Exhilarating theatre that reminds us entertainment and substance are not mutually exclusive.

A celebration of queer lives, fearless storytelling and one extraordinary performance.

What does it mean to dance as though there is no tomorrow? For British playwright Jack Holden, the answer lies somewhere between the euphoria of a Soho dancefloor and the devastating reality of the AIDS crisis. Since Cruise, his Olivier-nominated debut, Holden has continued to make theatre that finds extraordinary human stories in the collision of history, identity and survival. From the small-town murder mystery KENREX to his adaptation of The Line of Beauty, his work combines propulsive storytelling with a keen eye for the lives that history threatens to erase. Now, Fruit Box Theatre brings its acclaimed Australian production of Cruise to the Seymour Centre, inviting Sydney audiences back into a world where every night out might be the last and every dance matters.

Across Holden’s work, a distinctive theatrical language is emerging. He favours stories with an immediate, arresting hook: a queer odyssey through Soho, a small-town American murder, a literary portrait of desire and privilege, an immersive reimagining of Neverland. His writing embraces transformation, with performers shifting rapidly between characters, most strikingly in Cruise and KENREX, while music functions as more than accompaniment. It becomes a driving force in the storytelling, from the live musical landscapes of those two works to the pop-fuelled world of Club NVRLND.

Running through it all is an interest in identity and social history, particularly queer experience, and in the people whose lives illuminate the larger forces shaping their times. Holden’s gift is to make these stories feel at once intimate and expansive, translating them into theatre that is visceral, inventive and unmistakably alive.

And so, to Cruise - a Sydney return for Fruit Box Theatre following its spectacular Australian debut at KXT on Broadway in 2025. Directed with panache by Sean Landis, the production has at its centre the extraordinary Fraser Morrison, whose award-winning performance is the engine of the entire piece. Over 100 minutes, Morrison inhabits more than twenty characters, shifting between voices, accents, physicalities and temperaments with astonishing precision. This is an act of transformation, so fluid and complete that the solitary performer seems to conjure an entire community into being. The result is a performance that is as technically dazzling as it is deeply human.

Ultimately, there is little more to say except go and see it. Be thrilled that we have a generation of artists who refuse to play it safe: who champion stories beyond the mainstream, give voice to lives too often overlooked, and understand that theatre can be both an act of remembrance and a defiant celebration of being alive. These are artists who know that entertainment and substance are not mutually exclusive, and that the most exhilarating theatre can also be the most necessary.

Cruise is a celebration of queer lives lived defiantly, a reminder of those lost to the AIDS crisis, and a testament to the power of theatre to make history immediate and personal.

That this production has returned to Sydney, stronger for the journey and anchored by Morrison’s remarkable performance, is cause for celebration. The dancefloor may be in 1980s Soho, but the heartbeat is entirely contemporary. Get yourself to the Seymour Centre.

Review by Kate Gaul

Image: Abraham de Souza