4/5

THE PROLIFIC Simon Stephens’s latest offering tells the story of New York-based Dutch banker Willem who, on his brother Pauli’s demise, returns to Amsterdam to be with his family and to attend the funeral.

Shunning the parental home he opts for an impersonal hotel room where, over the course of seven days, he composes a series of letters to his dead brother.

They make up this 80-minute monologue through which Willem gives chronological expression to his confused and ambiguous reaction to Pauli’s death and familial grief.

Willem has become distant and disconnected from his family and younger self. His former lover Isaac has a happy life in his native city renovating canal boats and a has stable and loving partner, while the protagonist works in financial services in a distant land with an apparently casual and sporadic sex life.

He’s unable to cope with his father’s grief, there is tension with his sister and he struggles insincerely to comfort his sobbing mother.

His prosaic telling of this tale is punctuated by harrowing episodes of anguished self-awareness.

Alienation from antecedents, family and, possibly most of all, from himself, is the dominant theme. The death of Pauli is almost incidental and secondary to Willem’s realisation that his own life is superficial and transitory: “It’s not where you are, it’s where you disappear,” he observes.

Directed by Ivan van Hove, the action takes place within an anonymous and sterile space, with Jan Versweyveld’s deceptively intricate design and lighting relying on shadow and silhouette as much as on direct and ambient lighting to make an impact.

Within this sparse and stripped-down environment, Eelco Smits as Willem spends much of the time naked — a deliberate element within the play which reinforces the light, shade and desolation of the narrative text.

Smits gives a sustained and credible performance and displays a subtle vocal talent in performing the song of the play’s title, a poignant composition and arrangement by Mark Eitzel.

All credit to Simon Stephens who has produced a soulful, poignant and poetically accessible script.