Almost every one-off gig is marketed as a ‘don’t miss’ event – this one was described as a “totally unique experience”, a statement which could be taken either way. Mike Rosenberg is better known by his stage name Passenger – it was the name of a band he founded in the 2000s, and while it disbanded in 2009, he retained the name for himself. His YouTube channel is popular – at the time of writing, he has 7.86 million subscribers, and by far the most watched video, of his song ‘Let Her Go’, has (again, at the time of writing) 18 million likes and 3,997,441,136 views. No wonder, then, that he sold out Theatre Royal Haymarket, though with those stats, I couldn’t help thinking that he could have gone to one of the capital’s larger venues.
Then again, it was one man and his guitars, swapped over every couple of songs, and perhaps the intimacy of this acoustic performance would probably have been lost in the relative vastness of, say, the Royal Festival Hall. He didn’t talk about playing arenas and stadiums, recalling instead the days of playing smaller music venues, the sort of places where the bars remained open throughout, and punters had no qualms in getting up, even mid-song, to get another round. Those sometimes rowdy audiences didn’t exactly suit his folk music – his tactic, to try to get some order in the house, had mixed results. He would talk fairly quietly, away from the microphone, to people in the front row, the idea being that others would stop and strain to listen. At Haymarket, this was the impetus to step away from the microphone and unplug his guitar amp to sing a number acoustically with a capital A.
The main reason for this gig was to showcase songs from the musical adaptation of Rachel Joyce’s 2012 novel The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. Rather than assuming everyone had seen it, Passenger was careful to talk the audience through the salient points of the show as the gig went on. But even for people like me who had made the trip to Chichester to see the musical in 2025, it was interesting to hear about the songwriting process for Harold Fry, which was markedly different to Passenger’s usual freestyling ways of coming up with compositions, because of the requirement for the songs to fit the story and its characters. The end result being what it is, let’s just say he understood the assignment.
A lot of the lyrics were emotionally intense, by Passenger’s own admission, though this came as no surprise to his loyal fanbase, who seem to find catharsis in listening to songs rich in lyrical content. (Even if the most memorable lyric of the night was, “Sing loud now / Oh, oh oh, oh, oh oh oh”.) There were some words in ‘Scare Away The Dark’, at the end of the gig, that provided some insights into Passenger’s take on modern society (the audience having spent most of the evening indulging in the thoughts of Harold Fry) – “‘There’s just no money’, said the rich to the poor / But it’s funny how there’s money when they’re going to war […] Please don’t rock the boat, don’t do anything drastic / Just sit back and watch marine life choking on plastic.” Food for thought in a remarkably varied and engaging concert.
PASSENGER: ONE FOR THE ROAD
Theatre Royal Haymarket
1 February 2026
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is booking until 18 April 2026
