The Ocean at the End of the Lane

adapted by Joel Horwood from Neil Gaiman's novel

seen at the Duke of York's Theatre on 28 April 2022

Katy Hudd directs Tom Mackley as Boy (on the night I attended), Nia Towle as Lettie Hempstock, Nicholas Tennant as the boy's father, Grace Hogg-Robinson as his sister, Penny Layden as old Mrs Hempstock, Siubhan Harrison as Ginnie Hempstock (her daughter and Lettie's mother) and Laura Rogers as Ursula in this imaginative adaptation of Neil Gaiman's novel concerning the fateful irruption of a malignant spirit into the lives of the boy and his family, and the efforts of the mysterious Hempstocks to control and banish it.

The play begins as a reminiscence, the boy returning to his childhood home as a grown man while attending his father's funeral, but very soon we are in the thick of the real story as the boy meets and befriends the young girl Lettie just after having seen the body of the family lodger who had committed suicide. Though Gaiman's novels are aimed at a fairly young readership he does not pull his punches with some dark subjects; the boy has a panicked response which his father tries to assuage, but with typical English reticence much of the father's strategy is a matter of deflection. The Hempstocks seem preternaturally aware of the boy's predicament, but in their own way they are also not forthcoming, leaving him both intrigued and confused.

Lettie views the local village duckpond as an ocean, and this capacity, both fey and childlike, to see strange possibilities in the ordinary world is crucial in developing the atmosphere of the play and convincing us of the strange emanations which she and her family feel bound to monitor and control. The boy's means of coming to terms with the strangeness are bound up with his immersion in the Narnia books of C.S.Lewis (as Gaiman himself was), while his sister is of a more practical disposition: the tension between the siblings is palpable and convincing. When the strange spirit accidentally unleased on the world takes human form as the intrusive Ursula, the 'wicked stepmother' aspect of so many fairy tales takes on an all-too-believable abusive form in the modern world.

With an atmospheric use of the simplest stage effects - lighting, noise, dark shapes and diaphonous swirling sheets of fabric, the work of Fly Davis (set) and Jamie Harrison ('magic and illusions') among others - the numinous world threatening the boy and his family is thrillingly evoked, and the story resolves itself with a muted sense of the need for willing sacrifice and the consequent loss to those left behind. After the somewhat hectoring tone of Marys Seacole seen in the afternoon of the same day, it was a pleasure to witness masterly storytelling on stage.