PATRICK MARMION: Will Young’s one man play Song From Far Away only really zings when he’s singing

Song from Far Away 

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Four times we hear him sing. And in those four times, mere snippets of songs, we hear why Will Young won that first series of Pop Idol back in 2002. He has an effortless, mellifluous voice that oozes regret and longing.

But he’s not just at the Hampstead Theatre to sing. He’s there to reprise a one-person, 80-minute drama about a New York yuppie, Willem, whose life is unexpectedly shaken by the news of his brother’s death at home in Amsterdam.

Young’s turn was first seen in a short run at Manchester’s Home Theatre in February. The play dates back to 2015 and was written by playwright Simon Stephens, with musician Mark Eitzel, for the revered Belgian director Ivo van Hove (whose tortuous, not to say torturous, production of A Little Life starring James Norton recently terminated in the West End).

We follow Willem through a series of imaginary letters addressed to his dead brother, as Willem loads up on booze for the flight home, checks into a hotel rather than stays with his parents, enjoys a one-night stand, learns of his brother’s hereditary heart condition, attends the funeral and jets home.

It’s a tricky role in which we need to accept that Willem is numb with shock and in a state of emotional inertia – which only makes Young’s job of taking us into his confidence and winning our sympathy even more challenging. The play has an empathy deficit and the writers simply don’t give him or us enough rope.

Willem’s father is painted as emotionally remote. His mother cooks, cleans and tidies.

There’s only one moment when Young appears to well-up – an instant perhaps triggered by memories of his twin brother Rupert who took his own life in 2020. Otherwise the play keeps the pain of bereavement at arm’s length.

He’s there to reprise a one-person, 80-minute drama about a New York yuppie, Willem, whose life is unexpectedly shaken by the news of his brother’s death at home in Amsterdam

Nor is much made of Willem’s life as a banker – although the programme tells us it has something to do with capitalism being ‘predicated on a myth of immortality’. Not very helpful if you’re looking for some emotional LSD (pounds, shillings and pence, not psycho-pharmaceuticals). Young mirrors Willem’s emotional self-defence with the camp affectation of a constantly ascending intonation.

But, oddly for a singer, it’s a bit single register and only broken by flashes of anger.

There are, however, those four snippets of song when we get to feel Willem’s pain.

Even Kirk Jameson’s production conspires to make this little elegy a little sterile, thanks to the antiseptic setting of a hotel room stripped of colour and feature. Vanilla sofa, beige curtains, oat meal carpet. Tasteful but dull.

Young’s costume is made to match with a cream hoodie and khaki chinos, beneath his halo of bottle blond hair, tanned face and designer stubble.

It’s a story that really needs to move us. It has its moments, but never quite does.