Just before the lights went down as we settled in for The Ocean at the End of the Lane, my phone pinged with a message from a friend. I had posted a picture of the programme online and she had very kindly reached out to let me know some of the show’s potential trigger warnings (death, suicide, child abuse, if you’re counting). Fortunately I’d done my homework, and I reassured her I had steeled myself for what was coming. Then, one last message before we were plunged into darkness; “it’s f*cked up, in the best possible way”.
No matter how eloquently I write, I’ll be hard-pressed to come up with a better summary than that. Ocean is adapted from the novel of the same name by Neil Gaiman, the story of an unnamed young boy (Keir Ogilvy) and his battle with a supernatural force - dubbed ‘the flea’ - summoned to the English countryside through seismic, rupturing tragedy. With the help of best friend Lettie Hempstock (an enigmatic whirlwind of a performance by Millie Hikasa), he sets out to, if not restore order, at least understand the chaos.
You might recall the Hempstock name from their appearances in previous Gaiman works (The Graveyard Book, Stardust), and longtime fans will recognise some trademark Gaimanisms in the mix; plucky young protagonists with a taste for the metaphysical searching for a rabbit hole to fall down, a creeping otherworldly horror milling merrily around your kitchen - mysterious new lodger Ursula (played that night by Jasmeen James) carries more than a few aspects of Coraline’s Beldam in her cloying, honey-sweet play at domesticity.
The Hempstocks themselves maintain a delightfully matter-of-fact coexistence with the forces beyond. The prospect of a malevolent extra-dimensional being bleeding into our realm causes about the same level of quotidian consternation as a cow breaking through the farm fence. It’s wonderful, like Lovecraft meets The Archers, and it’s tied together beautifully by Finty Williams as forthright matriarch and benevolent Eldritch grandma Old Mrs Hempstock. By turns curmudgeonly and formidable, and always with a sly glint in her eye, she’s the perfect magical embodiment of the all-knowing mystique certain elderly people have to a young child, literally as old as the hills (“I was here first!” - I bet you were, OMH).
Of course, you’re expecting the magic lurking just beyond the mundane - it’s what Gaiman does best, after all. But there’s a richer, murkier depth to this arcane unease here. If I might dust off an old H.P chestnut, “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”. We normally conceive of that unknown in a cosmic sense - vast beings to whom our own existence is infinitesimally insignificant. But Ocean presents us with an incomprehensibility much closer to home - the fundamental inability to truly know the people around us.
The refrain “You never know what anybody’s thinking, no matter what they say,” crops up throughout, spoken first in the opening scene by the boy’s father (Trevor Fox) after they discover their first lodger has committed suicide in their car. As someone that lost a parent to suicide, I know pretty intimately the understandable but futile folly of attempting to find a single definitive explanation for why someone chooses to end their own life. Later, in possibly the most harrowing sequence in the show (and that’s saying something), Dad subjects his son to an intense sequence of physical abuse that I will not describe in detail here, and that line appears again. The extent to which this act was controlled by what’s lurking in the room next door is left deliberately ambiguous, and it makes Dad’s part in a later sequence involving a protective fairy circle one of the most quietly devastating moments I’ve ever seen on stage. Fox and Ogilvy run an absolute emotional marathon through this production, and really must be commended for their white-knuckle commitment to every gruelling beat of their characters’ arcs.
We can never entirely diagnose the motivations behind the actions of the people closest to us, the good or the ill they commit. They are flawed and fallible, and in their head there is a whole other universe, just as there may be an ocean in the duck pond at the bottom of the garden. Nor, with time, can we entirely trust our own perspective; “all your memories have imagination mixed in”, as Lettie has it. When you make memories you commune with the metaphysical. There will always be things beyond our reach. That understanding can be terrifying, and attempting to fight against it will twist you up like a 50p piece would a fish’s guts. Or it can be intensely liberating, to surrender yourself to the tide of a vast, unfathomable ocean and in doing so find “answers, answers, answers”. You can’t live there forever, but you can take a dip every now and again.
This is honed to a fine point by some frankly god-tier production design. My benchmark for when a show moves from good to great is when I fully take off my critic’s hat for a moment to stare open-mouthed at what’s in front of me, or when I swear involuntarily, both of which happened multiple times over the course of the night. The ensemble is an excellent, disquieting twist on theatrical convention - at first you assume they’re there to ferry props and set pieces from scene to scene. But with each sequence they become more unsettlingly reactive, actively engaging with the principal cast in a way that heightens the sense of unseen forces at play. Their choreography with Ogilvy and Hikasa is especially fluid and evocative, Lettie’s confrontation with the flea and the boy’s furtive midnight escape to the Hempstock farm being particular standouts.
Multiple actors propel the writhing pincers and shifting limbs of the flea's true form, a mass of canvas, bone, tendrils and talons that seems in a constant, hostile state of flux. Ursula disappears and reappears in the boy’s kitchen with magician-slickness as a rotating mass of identical doors close in and disappear. The appearance of a single, bloodied hand has left me suspicious of my bathtub for at least the next month. And as they enter the titular ocean, the boy and Lettie, in a brief moment of respite, become puppets rocked and carried by waves of diaphanous silks. It’s the stuff of nightmares; it’s the stuff of dreams.
There is so much more I could write about this production, but I will cut myself short and simply say that this demands to be witnessed. It is without a doubt one of the best pieces of theatre I’ve seen in years, maybe decades. Just make sure you have a hand to hold onto.