Gone, for the time being, is the staticky hush of an expectant crowd at an old-school gig. Cancelled, too, is the wider tour Laura Marling would have undertaken in support of her seventh album, Song for Our Daughter.

Instead, the British singer-songwriter takes to the stage of a deserted Union Chapel with only five camerapeople, a handful of sound crew and a skeleton venue staff for company. According to Marling’s representatives, 4,000 tickets have been sold – a figure that would have filled this atmospheric venue four times over and then some. (A second gig follows, pretty much the same set all over again, geo-fenced for US fans.)

The camera finds Marling almost casually. She is a pale, white-blond figure in an oatmeal polo neck and faded jeans, lit by halogen footlights and a few candles. Standing at the microphone, guitar in hand, her full-body pallor is gradually revealed to be in painterly contrast with the rich, three-dimensional dusk of the venue.

It all looks sumptuous – emphatically not like wobbly mobile phone footage from someone’s kitchen, the “gigs” that fans have been surviving on in lockdown. One immediate upside of the careful, circling camerawork is being able to see Marling – whose dextrous, fluid musicianship doesn’t get the kudos it deserves – play her guitar up close. Later, director Giorgio Testi will use multiple distant camera angles to film Marling against the fading light streaming in through the stained glass above the nave.

With no preamble, Marling begins a suite of four songs from her 2013 album, Once I Was an Eagle, which deal forensically with leave-takings and foundering love. In one of her regular guitar tutorials from lockdown, Marling explained that she wrote these songs as one meditative 10-minute salvo. It has become her go-to opening for solo acoustic gigs.

It works: the exhilarating run up the frets that Marling’s fingers take on Take the Night Off creates the rush of liftoff. Strange as it seems, initially this is a show that does not lack for emotional heft. The guitar turbulence also hints at the roiling going on beneath the alabaster surface of her delivery.

This gig’s hyper-focused stage management might not work for a different kind of artist – there’s little room for wild catharsis here – but it does, in spades, for Marling. There has long been something of a stiff upper lip to her – a very English reserve with which she has conveyed tales of passion from a kind of deep freeze.

This setting allows her to perform her songs with perfect control, creating an atmosphere broken only for a moment when a roadie hands Marling a guitar for What He Wrote. She only makes eye contact with the camera briefly, a few songs from the end, on Goodbye England; later, there is a brief half-smile.

Moreover, such a successful staging points forward to a potentially key source of income for artists starved of touring cash. There is such an optimism to this gig: that if you build a special show, the fans will come, and pay £12 for a virtual night out (plus a discretionary donation, split between Refuge and the Trussell Trust). Clearly, no beer will be spilt; no one will fall in love with a stranger. You can’t even shout requests because the comments are disabled.

Ultimately, Marling herself makes this an event worth tuning into. Her output just seems to get better and better, even as her songs ape obvious sources more and more openly: Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, a little Leonard Cohen.

Unlike many releases, which lockdown pushed back, the drop of Marling’s latest album, Song for Our Daughter, was pulled forward to April from August; there was little point, she felt, in sitting on it. It followed a break in which Marling wrote original music for Peaky Blinders and collaborated with theatre director Robert Icke on his production of Mary Stuart. A previous album interlude found Marling becoming a yoga teacher. She is currently studying for a master’s in psychoanalysis.

All of this searching comes to some kind of a head on these newest tracks, four of which form a mid-set suite of their own, denuded of their album orchestrations but still gleaming. Marling’s writing, never obvious, takes on a fresh maturity here: Fortune tells of a woman’s secret stash of cash, in case she ever needed to run.

Best of all, Held Down is not the final song, but it is the peak of the set, another tale of leave-taking whose melody almost swaggers. When this most retro of trailblazers leaves, it’s with as little fuss as she began.