Mature Times reviews The Ocean at the End of the Lane at Bristol Hippodrome.
“The past doesn’t feel far away. Just around the corner, really.” So says Neil Gaiman in an introduction to his hit stage play, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Talking of the past, the book from which the play is drawn was voted Book of the Year at the British National Book Awards in 2013. As a novelist and screenwriter, Gaiman is up there with the best of them.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane is brought to us by the renowned producers of War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and anyone who has seen those shows will know how excellent they were. And tonight was no exception.
A thrilling adventure of fantasy, myth and friendship the story takes audiences on an epic journey to a childhood once forgotten and the darkness that lurks at the very edge of it.
It’s a story of a family struggling to cope with the loss of their wife and mother, a story of how one member, the Boy (Keir Ogilvy, superb), a voracious reader does so by retreating into his own world fuelled by his fertile imagination and all those stories that he continually reads as a way of making his difficult life a little more bearable.
And it’s that Boy and his relationship with three generations of the Hempstock family, farming women on whose land he used to play, that dominate the rest of the story. For it is the youngest, Lettie Hempstock (Millie Hikasa), who claims that the pond where he used to play is not a pond but is actually an ocean where anything is possible.
The family had taken in a lodger to help make ends meet, but he is found dead shortly after stealing the family car. With financial pressures continuing, another lodger is found for the family home, an attractive single woman, Ursula (Charlie Brooks menacing and threatening). She soon has the widower father (Trevor Fox) under her spell, and that is where the darkness starts and where the Boy’s imagination kicks in as the story plays out.
We are treated to a stage set that is all moody, ghostly and full of dangers designed by Fly Davis, augmented superbly by Lighting Designer, Paule Constable’s atmospheric and visually stunning work. But, as you would expect from the people that gave us War Horse, it is the puppetry, especially the domineering stage-filling monsters that are superb whilst the movement from and choreography of the ensemble gives the illusion that the ocean is actually moving in front of your eyes.
There’s a bit of magic as well especially when Ursula, in perhaps her most menacing scenes appears all over the stage in rapid succession through a series of doors you wonder just how she manages to move so quickly.
But it is the Boy who fights the powers of evil that invade his imaginings, aided by the Hempstock women, who are a little eccentric to say the least, and what a fight and what a journey it proves to be. In the end the story is all about emotions and feelings, feelings of loneliness, of loss, of love, of friendship and of hope and how the Boy, with a little help from his friends, ultimately overcomes them.
It’s a great night out, guaranteed to entertain.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane is at Bristol Hippodrome until the 19th August and then continues to tour around the country. For more information and to book tickets follow this link.
