Edfringe2026: Cruising

★★★★★

Cruising is a play about open relationships, political activism, and queer love. I went in expecting something provocative, perhaps even deliberately confrontational. Instead, I found it surprisingly moving.

The story begins when Sam (Davy Roderick) and Amelia (Clare Stenning) meet on a cruise. Sam appears gentle and somewhat reserved, while Amelia is energetic, confident, and immediately commanding. Amelia works as an entertainer on the ship. Sam, meanwhile, did not even buy his own ticket. His mother won the cruise in a lottery.

Their first conversations are playful but gradually become more revealing. Sam tells Amelia that he is an environmental activist and that he has come on the cruise partly to protest the environmental damage caused by the industry. At one point, he even claims that he has been to prison. Then Amelia suddenly says, “I know who you are.” Apparently, both of them are in a relationship with the same person, Toni, who is also an activist.

What is impressive is that the play never treats politics and intimacy as two separate subjects. It tells us that our political beliefs often enter our private lives: into the people we love, the compromises we make, and even the way we understand another person.

Because they are both in a relationship with the same person, Amelia already knows Sam through Toni’s stories. Sam therefore asks Amelia to get to know him directly rather than relying on Toni’s version of him.

This is where the play becomes much more interesting: Sam and Amelia are negotiating the strange experience of being seen through somebody else’s eyes. Toni is absent, yet their presence shapes almost every interaction between them.

Meanwhile, there is a difference between the two partners. Sam was Toni's partner when they went into the prison. Sam therefore, also suffered a psychological collapse. The play therefore asks a difficult question: who gets to claim suffering? Sam did not endure what Toni endured, and yet the consequences of Toni’s imprisonment entered his own body and mind.

That complexity is one of the strongest aspects of Cruising. It refuses to divide people into the brave and the cowardly, the activist and the passive observer, or the politically committed and the politically compromised. Sam can lie about having been in prison and still be deeply wounded by Toni’s imprisonment. Amelia can be courageous enough to help organise a protest and still become terrified when the consequences suddenly become real. Toni can be politically brave while also being capable of hurting the person closest to them.

The play also evoked other questions: If someone gives up political activism for personal happiness, are they necessarily a coward? And what about the families and partners of political prisoners? Their courage may look less dramatic because they are not the ones being arrested, but they live with the absence, fear, uncertainty, and sometimes the psychological transformation of the person who eventually comes home. Political action does not stop at the activist’s body. Its consequences spread through relationships.

The show’s leaflet tells us that it is about two people who are both involved with the same person. It sounds like a private, even slightly scandalous romantic arrangement. Yet the questions underneath it are public and political: How much responsibility do we have for another person? When someone we love makes a political choice, do we also inherit part of its consequences?

One small moment stayed with me after the play. After the protest, Sam’s face is covered in tears. Amelia rushes over and jokes, “Did they pepper-spray you?” Sam laughs and says no. He was simply terrified and could not stop crying.

It is funny, but it also captures something essential about the play. Courage is not the absence of fear. Political commitment does not transform someone into a fearless person, and vulnerability does not automatically make someone weak.

And love itself is political, because loving someone means becoming vulnerable to the world that acts upon them.