The room is hot, sticky and covered in trampled confetti. A mashup of noughties bangers impels our bodies to move. As Club Nvrlnd draws to a close, the audience doesn’t want to get off the stage, our throats scratchy from screaming along. “I’m singing along to every word, every night,” grins the show’s writer, Jack Holden, bounding over after having just had a boogie on the platform. We are all glistening with sweat and nostalgia, this show’s giddy delirium impossible to resist.
Over the next few months, the spotlight is sticking to Holden. A powerhouse of a performer and a deft, emotive writer, the 35-year-old’s jukebox-nightclub musical already has audiences at the Edinburgh fringe lining up in the street. His adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s queer classic novel The Line of Beauty, meanwhile, is soon to be staged at the Almeida in London, and the true-crime thriller Kenrex, that he co-wrote and stars in, is returning for a London run. “I’m an optimist,” he says, smiling bashfully over coffee earlier in the day. “I say yes to things then work out how to do them.”
Proving his muscle as an actor in War Horse and comedy series Ten Percent, Holden showed his strength as a writer with Cruise, an electronically scored story of a survivor of the Aids crisis blended with his time volunteering at LGBTQ+ listening service Switchboard. Seeing the Olivier-nominated show, producer David Adkin and director Steve Kunis approached Holden with another challenge: to write the book for a musical transposing the familiar story of Peter Pan into a noughties nightclub. “I’m a Peter Pan myself,” Holden admits. “Afraid of growing up, trying to create musical, euphoric, hedonistic neverlands of my own. With Club Nvrlnd, I’ve been able to realise it in my purest, most silly, unashamed way.”
In this hazy, fairy-dust-fuelled world we, the lost boys, join Peter (a petulant Thomas Grant) on the eve of his 30th birthday. Having peaked in high school, he’s now refusing to grow up. RuPaul’s Drag Race’s Le Fil shines as our compere Tiger Lily while a rival club owner, a glimmering, bare-chested Hook (Matthew Gent), tries to sabotage Nvrlnd. “It’s absolute chaos,” Holden grins. “I think we found our audience last night. They are young and ready to dance.”
Music pulsates through all of Holden’s work. For Kenrex, his thriller co-written with Ed Stamboulian, he has continued his collaboration with The Little Unsaid’s John Patrick Elliot, who scored Cruise. The show has been seven years in the making. “We’ve cooked it low and slow,” Holden says. “It’s not a cost-effective process.” But it has given them time to find the right form for what began as an experiment, asking whether it was possible to stage a true-crime podcast. They had workshopped the show with a cast of 10 when lockdown hit. “We realised, in true-crime radio, you hear voices in sequence,” he reasons, “so it could be coming from one voice.” Holden now plays every part.
To watch his performance over the course of Kenrex is to see a shapeshifter in action. With Elliot’s music and clever tech, Holden rolls through the roster of distinct characters who, in 1981, finally decide to take justice into their own hands. Holden found inspiration in Andrew Scott’s one-man show Vanya, which revealed the power in taking time to transition between characters. “Kenrex is an exercise in stillness,” he says. “It’s a tightrope walk every night.”
Holden’s theatrical exploration of the 80s continues with The Line of Beauty, which he is adapting for Rupert Goold’s last season at the Almeida. His version streamlines the text to focus on the four young men as they navigate the decade’s societal shifts with varying levels of privilege. “It’s about how much has changed,” says Holden, “but also how much of that entrenched class structure and snobbery is absolutely the same.” The story also returns his focus to the Aids crisis. “I have fictional arguments in my head about why I’m doing another play about [this topic],” he says. “But then I argue back and go: how many war movies have been made?”
Born in 1990, Holden questions his place to write about the 80s, but he sees its long shadow snaking through his life, with the homophobic legislation Section 28 only repealed when he was a teenager. “Older gay friends who remember before the Aids crisis say everyone was just having a wild time,” he says ruefully. “Then Aids came along and instilled so much terror.”
Now, with the ready availability of the drug PrEP, Holden hopes the debilitating weight of that fear is finally lifting. “It’s a bit of a sexual renaissance,” he laughs. Freedom is starting to unfurl again. The looseness of bodies. The embrace of a wild night out. The unadulterated fun that Club Nvrlnd encourages. Holden smiles. “The best drama always happens on the dancefloor.”
