In some ways, anything short of the physical resurrection of the late David Bowie would have been a disappointment as regards this musical based around his songs, which was running off-Broadway when he died in January. However, it has an impressive pedigree: lauded Belgian director Ivo van Hove and his regular designer Jan Versweyveld (recycling his hotel-room set for Song From Far Away, seen last year at the Young Vic), a book by multi-award-winning playwright Enda Walsh, musical arrangements by Henry Hey who played keyboards on Bowie’s album The Next Day, and a central trio of players from the New York production, led by Dexter star Michael C. Hall.

Hall plays Thomas Jerome Newton, the extraterrestrial portrayed by Bowie in the 1976 film The Man Who Fell To Earth. In some ways this is a sequel to that tale, showing Newton some years on, stranded on Earth in a dissociative fog of gin and memories. Van Hove and Walsh also acknowledge director Nicolas Roeg’s approach to the movie by telling their story more or less chronologically but not in a linear narrative fashion. They cross-cut cubistically to other characters – his assistant Elly, the nebulously Mephistophelean Valentine – make liberal use of video projection to show multiple perspectives and introduce songs more for colour than advancement of story. (“Where Are We Now” is cued by the simple means of Newton putting on the vinyl LP in question.)

In some ways this is a Faustian fable, with good and evil angels attempting to sway Newton; in some ways, it is the standard Walsh theme of a paralysed, dysfunctional environment overturned by the wilful irruption of an unexpected figure (or two). Put it this way: Grease it ain’t. But the Bowie dimension... I was going to say “excuses”, but it goes deeper: it explains and grounds much of this head-spinning evening. Our awareness of his persona of otherness — and use of the evanescence of identity — from Ziggy Stardust through to the bleakly shimmering musings of his latter years, culminating in Blackstar, leads us to recognise that a proper Bowie musical was never going to be succinctly explicable. Yet it does not trade lazily on his brand: a number of Hey’s arrangements, in particular the closing ‘”Heroes”’, cannily ring the changes to avoid otherwise invidious comparisons. (Contrariwise, it’s equally impressive to hear the seven-piece band faithfully grind out a number as obstreperous as “It’s No Game (No. 1)”.) Hall finds a mode of depicting semi-detached otherness which is not impersonation, and it all adds up to a couple of hours of poignant remembrance as well as a satisfyingly chewy work in its own right. In some ways.

Written for the Financial Times.