Like last year’s award-winning indie theatre hit The Inheritance, UK actor/playwright Jack Holden’s Cruise sets out to build a bridge between today’s young queer men and their elders – particularly those who experienced the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.

Fraser Morrison in Cruise. Photo © Abraham de Souza

Told in the form of a multi-character monologue, Cruise opens with the arrival of a callow young man at his new job, volunteering at an LGBTIQ+ Switchboard. Until now, he’s only ever worked under supervision. Tonight, he’s on his own.

He’s immediately thrown into the deep end. His first call – one in which he is asked to bear witness to an act of self-harm – shakes him hard.

The second call, however, is from someone called Michael, a charismatic older man with a story to tell that takes our switchboard listener (and the audience) back to London’s Soho in the early 1980s.

These were very different times for gay men, times in which men could be beaten up, arrested in vice squad stings, publicly humiliated in a shrieking tabloid headline and worse. But in Michel’s recounting of his coming of age in that...