Last week William Winter sat down with Sean Landis, artistic director of Fruit Box Theatre and director of their upcoming production Cruise. Written by Jack Holden and nominated for Best New Play at the 2022 Olivier Awards, Cruise is an intergenerational monologue spanning a four-decade period in the heart of London’s queer club scene. Below, Sean runs us through some of the production process, talks us through the story behind Fruit Box, and shares his personal connection to USyd arts and revues.
Will: Thank you so much for joining me today Sean! Why don’t you start us off with a little bit about Cruise?
Sean: Cruise is a one-person play written by British playwright Jack Holden that had its world premiere two years ago, and this is the Australian premiere. It’s a story that tracks this four-decade period between the 1980s and 2010’s, and this intergenerational conversation between two queer men, the younger of which is working for a crisis line called Switchboard. He receives a call from an older queer man who lived through the AIDs crisis in London and we get this beautiful story of Michael (the caller)’s life; him moving to London, having parties and sex, and loving and living in this time of a huge epidemic. It’s a really stunning story, it’s heartwarming and beautiful but also tragic, and it’s a big gift to dive into it through this rehearsal process.
W: You’ve worked with several community consultants throughout the development process. How did you make those connections? And what has it been like to work with them?
S: Wilfred [Roach] is part of Sex. Riot. Repeat. which is a play written by Felicity Nicol that Fruit Box has been supporting the development of. The play is an Australian queer history lesson told by an ensemble of young actors and featuring queer elders sharing verbatim stories. Wifred is one of the elders from the piece and was living in London in the 80’s, so I was like “this is the perfect person to bring into the room”.
In our first week of rehearsals Wifred came in and Fraser [Morrison, performer], Jeremy [Lloyd, movement director], and myself chatted and asked him questions. He told us his story, and it was beautiful and hard, but really important. This play is about the connection between generations, and as an independent theatre company we tend to work with younger creatives, so it felt really crucial that we were bringing in the voices of people living in this time.
Johnny Seymour is a friend of my producer Hana Truban. Johnny is a legend in Sydney, they’ve been DJing and creating queer community space in Sydney since the late 80’s. Johnny told us all about what it was like to live in that time from a club/music perspective, which is very crucial to the play. Johnny told us that their second gig in Sydney was a wake, and there’s a lot of times in these scenes where music is blasting and Fraser is dancing and we’ve been like “this is a wake”, we’re dancing with that energy of grief. It’s a lot, but wonderful to have all these voices in the room.
W: How do you see the show’s depiction of London queer life compared to Sydney’s?
S: I mean look, it’s very British. There’s 27 characters and we’re doing different voices for every single character, but there’s something about… talking to Wilfred and Johnny, there’s a big British influence in the Australian queer scene, language, and our references. When I was first chatting with Jack Holden [the playwright] about the music choices in the script, he said “I don’t know if I Will Survive will be as relevant to Sydney audiences.” I just said “mate, Priscilla!”
The exact history of how Australia and New South Wales responded to the epidemic is different, but a lot of the cultural references and the heart and the feelings are way more universal than even I thought going into it. Even the humour, like this is all funny here, too.
W: You mention 27 characters. How do you, as a director, go about directing 27 characters across a four-decade timeline?
S: It was really important to create separation between those characters and know who they were in body and voice. I worked closely with Jeremy Lloyd, an incredible movement director and choreographer, and they worked really closely with myself and Fraser to create body language that feels distinct, authentic, and creates worlds. Equally, working with Linda Nicholls-Gidley, who is an incredible vocal coach, has brought in all the accent work and vocal inflections. Fraser is so skilled, it’s really a craft, creating all these characters and moments and working out how they blend together when they’re having conversations and when they really need to stand out, and when they need to be a caricature or a fully fleshed out human. It’s a lot of trial and error in seeing what works, and a lot of trust in the rehearsal room.
W: How do you see Cruise in relation to Fruit Box’s vision and intention as a theatre company?
S: It’s funny, I was chatting about this with Madeleine [Gandhi, co-founder of Fruit Box] last week and we were remembering why we started Fruit Box, that we set out to bring queer people together in a safe space to tell stories, feel seen, to share, and to make art. Part of that is this intergenerational conversation, but part of it is about creating the room and what happens in that room. I guess I’d say it connects to the work we’ve done because it’s us trying to create autonomous queer theatre. Something really magical happens when there’s a bunch of queer people in a room telling stories, and it’s safe and supportive and trusting and emotional, and I’m ready to bring audiences into that, even though it’s the scariest part.
W: One of things I find interesting with Fruit Box is the way you approach “high” and “low” art, especially in relation to this show and drawing from the “high” art of theatre and content which is historically seen as “low”. How do you see Fruit Box in relation to these ideas?
S: Queer people have been plagued in the low art space for so long, and I have a lot of love for that, for club performances, for drag, for weird and wacky shit. I think Fruit Box has played with that a little bit. We do our shiny theatre performances, and then we do our community events like Queer Compost, which was a crowd-sourced community storytelling night, and the cabaret nights we do are thrown together and messy in this gorgeous, beautiful combination of things. It’s always been important to us to not just be a theatre company trying to produce a finished product, but also presenting things which feel authentic to our community.
This ties in to Cruise cause it’s a play about the club. It’s about music, it’s about cruising and sex spaces and grit, and I want to work with artists who are from these different worlds. It feels like we’re not creating a play as much as a hybrid art piece thing. I give a lot of autonomy to my designers, like this is the vision but put your own spin on it, which is exciting.
W: You’re a USyd alumni, and… okay, this is a leading question because I mentioned this interview to my first Queer Revue director Cat on the weekend and she told me she did Queer Revue with you.
S: Oh yes, love Cat!
W: I actually directed the 2024 show, and I just think this is a beautiful lineage we’re continuing here with this interview, coming from the Queer Revue community.
S: Tea.
W: So as a USyd alumni, what sort of creative spaces did you find that helped you figure out where to go next?
S: I mean, Queer Revue is the foundation of everything I am right now actually, I love that space. I did the 2019 Queer Revue, which was Dead Bi Morning directed by Chloe Farrington, Aiden Magro, and Ruby Innes, and it changed my life. It was my first time being in a creative space with all queer people, it was stupid, it was silly, and it had really great elements but didn’t need to be polished. It was such a playground for expression, and I loved it so much.
Then I worked with quite a few friends I made at Queer Revue at a SUDS show the next year, which was the first time I directed in 2020. It was an adaptation of Orlando by Virginia Woolf, and that was unintentionally a team that was 90% queer, and that was a really big, ambitious, colourful, silly time, and coming out of that project was when Maddie and I got close. We were like “something really special happens when queer people come together and make art, let’s do something with that”. Fruit Box was born out of the journey from Queer Revue to SUDS. USyd theatre really is amazing, I’m very grateful for what I had there.
W: Yeah, Queer Revue is wack, it changes something in you. I’ve been having conversations with a few people in a similar space to me, where we’ve finished our time with the revues but aren’t quite sure what is next. How did you navigate that jump from uni spaces to something more professional like Fruit Box?
S: God it’s hard, and I feel like I’m still in the jump actually. I would say… just be bold. Fruit Box was an insane decision; Maddie and I were both working, I was working as a paralegal and Maddie was working at the Attorney-General’s Department in Canberra. We really decided to do this because we wanted to and because we, at the time, weren’t seeing the space we wanted to make art in existing. Since then we’ve found a lot more like-minded creatives and organisations that we weren’t aware of at that time, but if you want something and you don’t see it in front of you, make it.
I think it’s hard. Sydney is a weird ecosystem, there’s a lot of art happening but it feels really under-resourced, there’s not a lot of money and there’s not a lot of venues, especially for independents. But I do really believe in finding the people you wanna make stuff with and trying to do it however you can. Being bold, not taking no for an answer, and trying everything. And don’t worry about it being perfect, because it won’t ever be perfect, and I tell myself that daily. It’s a lesson for myself as much as anyone else.
W: I think that is the perfect point to end this interview on. What’s next for you and for Fruit Box?
S: Well immediately after Cruise we jump into rehearsals for SNAKEFACE, which is… oh my God, it’s so cool. It’s also a one-person play, written and performed by Aliyah Knight, a black queer creative who has written this poetic masterpiece. It’s directed by Bernadette Fam, it has an incredible creative team attached to it, it’s based on the myth of Medusa, and it is cool as shit. I am so excited. That’s us for the middle of the year, and I don’t know what’s happening past that.
W: Then it’s just continuing the bright future for Fruit Box.
S: Exactly, stardom and fame.
Cruise will be performed at KXT on Broadway from the 12-22nd of February.
