Prior to its return this autumn, the team behind the Old Vic’s successful Christmas 2015 staging of Dr Seuss’s The Lorax – director Max Webster, scriptwriter David Greig and composer Charlie Fink – have, so to speak, got the band back together for a late show following the main presentation each evening of Woyzeck. The core of this project is not a children’s book but former Noah And The Whale frontman Fink’s first solo album.

In a simple 65-minute show, Fink’s solo vocal/acoustic guitar/recorded backing (mostly strings) songs generally alternate with and illustrate the monologue delivered by Jade Anouka as Sarah, searching for her former lover and musical partner Frank, who disappeared and is presumed dead by most others. Frank, it emerges, was (is?) almost impossibly introverted, believing that in an age when both creation and consumption of music are so accessible, the ultimate musical statement is silence, the absence of a classic album. (Hence the musical/fugitive pun of the title.) Sarah follows clues the length and breadth of the country, until... well, until the dénouement.

Fink has an assurance as a writer and performer that makes his songs appear more complex musically and lyrically than they often are. (The fictitious hit single “I Was Born To Be A Cowboy” seems to me to duplicate the chord progression of Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”.) In the few scenes of dialogue with Anouka, he seems much stiffer and less varied, perhaps because the Twickenham-born muso is unable to hide behind the strong transatlantic twang in which he sings.

With Greig’s script it’s the other way round: simple, direct modes of expression disguise deeper and knottier meditations on our presence in the world, both in general and with respect to particular individuals. The stage is bare but for a low rostrum surrounded with rope lighting, but Anouka’s straightforward performance leaps across the empty space to the audience.

This is, if we’re honest, a bit of an experiment for all concerned, both for the makers (although it’s far from Greig’s first project to combine theatre and song) and for Old Vic artistic director Matthew Warchus in terms of programming. Modest ambitions, modest achievement... fair enough, then.

Written for the Financial Times.