Neil Gaiman’s supernatural tale is theatre at its gob-smacking best
The Ocean at the End of the Lane Duke of York’s, London WC2
The Ocean at the End of the Lane might just prove the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for the National after coming through the stormy weather of the pandemic. It has been two years since I acclaimed this illusion-steeped, spellbinding staging of Neil Gaiman’s 2013 novel about a boy whose introverted, bookish world is besieged by supernatural forces.
It was a sell-out sensation as a thrust-stage show at the Dorfman. Now, behind the Duke of York’s proscenium arch, with tendrils creeping from the circle boxes, it has somehow got even better, plunging us into a wildly fictional encapsulation of – and escape from – psychological trauma, thereby offering a timely paean to the power of the imagination for young (12 and up) and old alike.
In Gaiman’s book, framed as the retrospect of the unnamed boy-hero in middle age, things start to slide out of their normal groove following the suicide of a lodger taken in by his cash-strapped parents, and the adultery-stirring arrival of a new interloper called Ursula Monkton. In Joel Horwood’s version, the lodger’s death is still a key factor. But we’re a year on from the mother’s death, heightening the distress caused by the materialisation of Monkton, who sets herself up as a surrogate mum, all disingenuous smiles and disconcerting wiles, winning over “Dad” and “Sis”.
At the story’s wounded heart, then, is the model of all primal familial battles, common to many households where some kind of displacement has happened and a child is navigating the arrival of adolescence. But there’s a head-spinning cleverness at work.
The story is about boundaries being breached – according to the lad’s ethereal new-found friend Lettie, Monkton is a visitor from another realm, who must be repelled at all costs. And the tale openly alludes to other children’s fiction and the blurry lines between perception and reality. Disbelief is thus tricksily suspended – the action is both what is “felt” to be occurring and what is actually doing so; any clear distinctions collapse.
Katy Rudd’s production honours every philosophical beat and every pulse-racing thud of the experience, as good as putting us in the shoes of James Bamford’s bashful, inquisitive Boy and Nia Towle’s quick-witted Lettie, whose hooded red coat seems stitched with fairy-tale magic. It’s Lettie who tells him that the local Sussex duck pond is in fact an ocean, and by the end of the show you have a Blakean sense of the boundless universe being reachable through ordinary portals.
Brightly lit door frames are a constantly utilised marvel in Fly Davis’s set, which is lined with woody, leafless thickets that can glow in the dark and rise from their roots too. There’s no better illustration of the astounding mise en scène (lit by Paule Constable) than the way Laura Rogers’s Ursula seems to defy physics as she enters and exits a multiplying series of doors in a scene of hallucinogenic nightmare. She taunts her charge – the shadow of child abuse falls over this piece – by witchily hovering when he tries to flee.
All the performances are slickly spot-on, including Nicolas Tennant as the downbeat dad poignantly learning to reach out to his boy. The ensemble spirit up monstrous flapping beings using overt puppetry, shape-shifting themselves into things that go bump in the night, while the stage hands are so brisk and balletic in their precision they deserve their own ovation.
I wasn’t deluded the first time. This is British theatre at its gobsmacking best.
Until May 14. Tickets: 0844 871 7615; nationaltheatre.org.uk