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.”
