Latest news with #JackHolden
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Lost Boys get loose: Jack Holden on rebooting Peter Pan and The Line of Beauty
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.' Club Nvrlnd is at Assembly Checkpoint, Edinburgh, until 24 August; The Line of Beauty is at the Almeida, London, 21 October-29 November; Kenrex is at the Other Palace, London, from 3 December-1 February.
The Guardian
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Edinburgh festival 2025: 20 theatre shows to see this summer
Whenever you see a performance in Canada, it will begin with a land acknowledgment; a way of crediting those who were there before the Europeans arrived. Indigenous playwright Cliff Cardinal questions the motives of such declarations in a broadside that uses Shakespeare's pastoral comedy to comment on our attitude to the natural Hill theatre, 20-23 August Jack Holden, the formidable star of Cruise and Kenrex, is the author of this party-themed take on Peter Pan in which songs by Britney Spears, Katy Perry and Justin Timberlake celebrate the millennial generation that refused to grow up. Director Steven Kunis calls it 'a full-blown pop fantasy'.Assembly Checkpoint, 30 July-25 August Leaving its Roundabout pop-up theatre at home, Paines Plough has a lower-than-usual profile at this year's fringe, but is responsible for one of the flagship shows at the Traverse: a story of four generations of Northern Irish women. Directed by Katie Posner, Karis Kelly's dark family drama won the Women's prize for playwriting in theatre, 30 July-24 August From Belgium, actors Anemone Valcke and Verona Verbakel ask where social boundaries should lie for young women growing up after #MeToo. Drawing on their own experiences of sexism and abuse, they raise questions of shame and internalised misogyny in a show about watching and being Playground, 12-24 August William Kentridge returns to his 1995 version of the soul-selling fable and updates it to the age of the climate emergency. Handspring Puppet Company (of War Horse fame) imagines a rapacious Faustus plundering the African continent with colonialist greed, while the world picks up the Lyceum, 20-23 August Song of the Goat have been beguiling fringe audiences for two decades with their otherworldly polyphonic singing inspired by classical archetypes. This time, the Wrocław company gives Shakespeare's tragedy a pagan 3-15 August Afreena Islam-Wright is both a performer and a pub-quiz host, skills she combines in an interactive show about being British and Bangladeshi. Among her claims to fame is an appearance on The theatre, 31 July-24 August The government recently sold its remaining shares in NatWest Group (formerly Royal Bank of Scotland) after nearly 17 years of public ownership, losing £10.5bn in the process. Meanwhile, the bank's old boss, Fred Goodwin, is said to be picking up a £600,000 annual pension. James Graham's play – which stars Brian Cox – asks what went wrong in the city of Adam theatre, 30 July-9 August Trumpeter Jay Phelps, who has played with Amy Winehouse, Courtney Pine and Wynton Marsalis, provides the live soundtrack to Oliver Kaderbhai's play about Miles Davis and the making of Kind of Blue, the 1959 jazz landmark. Benjamin Akintuyosi 31 July-25 August Time was when pop stars felt they had to put up with scurrilous tabloid stories. Not so Elton John. Falsely accused of 'vice boy shame', he sued the Sun for libel. Henry Naylor's play takes up the story that ended with a 'Sorry Elton' headline and a £1m Dome, 30 July-24 August Joining forces again after England & Son and The Political History of Smack and Crack, campaigning actor/comedian Mark Thomas and playwright Ed Edwards look back to the 25-day Strangeways prison riot in 1990 and the liberal experiment that 31 July-25 August Part of the Made in Scotland showcase, Ruxandra Cantir's surreal cabaret is inspired by her upbringing in Moldova, a country where seemingly anything can be pickled. Featuring songs, puppetry and vegetables, it is an absurdist meditation on the preservation of life. Shona Reppe 31 July-25 August What started life as a highly entertaining – and unexpectedly moving – lecture about the Scottish pantomime tradition has morphed into a full-blown show. The great panto dame Johnny McKnight performs in glamorous Dorothy Blawna-Gale costume, celebrating the humour and radical spirit of the form. John Tiffany theatre, 1-24 August Smartphones at the ready as Mallorca's female-led La Mecànica creates a teen-friendly interactive event using the Kalliópê app developed by Barcelona's La Fura dels Baus. The show, about identity, technology and relationships, is observed through the audience's mobiles, which interact with the performers and 31 July-25 August The inspirational Ontroerend Goed has a record of surprising and unsettling work that redefines what theatre can be. It can, of course, be nothing without an audience and in this piece, the Belgian company uses video to celebrate the fact that nobody has the same experience of a live event. They call it interactive theatre for people who don't like interactive Southside, 12-24 August Actor Armando Babaioff relocates Michel Marc Bouchard's play from Canada to his native Brazil, where the story of a young man who leaves the city to attend his boyfriend's rural funeral has a special poignancy. Brazil, says Babaioff, 'leads the world in the killing of LGBTQ+ people'.Pleasance at EICC, 30 July-24 August This four-day celebration of Palestinian culture includes a lecture-performance by Noor Abuarafeh recounting a journey through the West Bank; a wordless object-theatre show by Mahmoud Alhourani about the devastation of war; and a play by Randa Jarrar following a woman who wakes up in 2055, the last person town hall, 12-15 August Novelist turned performer Alan Bissett imagines a conversation between two cultural icons: comedian Billy Connolly and the late author Alasdair Gray. The scene is the launch of Gray's modern classic Lanark in 1981, which Connolly is known to have attended. Bissett speculates on what the two Glaswegians said Storytelling Centre, 31 July-23 August Having extended her range to theatre with 2016's excellent Wind Resistance, folk singer Karine Polwart returns to the stage with a poetic and musical meditation inspired by the sabal palm in the glasshouse of Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Garden. The 200-year-old tree was chopped down in 2021 to make way for Queen's Hall, 9-13 August A wordless piece by Antwerp theatre collective FC Bergman exploring the passage of the seasons and our dependency on the land. Inspired by an ancient letter about the art of agriculture by the Greek poet Hesiod, it is a visual commentary on the power of collective labour and the threat of Lyceum, 7-10 August
Time Out
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Club NVRLND
An immersive Peter Pan musical based around a tranche of early '00s pop hits sounds like a great piece of Fringe fluff, especially in a relatively late night slot where audiences can let their hair down a bit. Will Club NVRLND actually be good as well? Certainly there's good reason to hope: it's written by Jack Holden, whose Cruise was solid and KENREX even better. And the plot isn't just Peter Pan plus millenial bangers because lol: Holden's thesis is that millennials are a generation of lost boys (and girls), unable to grow up because of a capricious and unfair world that prices them out of property, kids etc. In it, Wendy is on the cusp of marriage – but reunion with the eternal boy Peter Pan throws everything into a spin. It's directed by Steven Kunis, with choreography from Ashley Nottingham.
