If your family’s taste in entertainment runs more to the fantastical and macabre than to sweetness and light, this show is for you. Neil Gaiman’s story is a fictionalised autobiography, in which supernatural and alien forces seep into a boy’s world. In Katy Rudd’s atmospheric staging of Joel Horwood’s adaptation, the background ensemble animate puppets large and small but also swoop and swirl the lead actors around the set. It brings the inside of Gaiman’s head to life.
Motherless Boy (excellent, gawky-but-smart Samuel Blenkin) has a scratchy relationship with his widowed father and his sister. But it is he who unwittingly invites into their midst an alien entity known as “the Flea” (serpentine Pippa Nixon), disguised as an insinuating, tantalising female presence.
To save the family from this wicked stepmother-in-waiting, Boy must look to his new friend, Lettie (engagingly plucky Marli Siu). Lettie lives on the neighbouring farm with her mother and grandmother and has no apparent father. “We don’t go in for that sort of thing,” says her mum, adding a whiff of ancient matriarchy to the farm’s witchy otherness. The “ocean” of the title is the farm’s fishpond, but as with everything here a simple appearance masks something far more complex. Boy’s budding relationship with Lettie is the flipside of his fear of the Flea. He distrusts artifice, but fiction at one point literally saves him.
Although it’s recommended for the over-12s, the younger children around me seemed to have no problem with scrawking, beaked monsters and the moments of horror when Boy plucks coins and worms from his flesh. Fly Davis’s set has props popping amusingly up and on. Movement director Steven Hoggett, composer Jherek Bischoff and lighting designer Paule Constable all contribute significantly to an enveloping, magical experience.
Until January 25 (020 7452 3000, nationaltheatre.org.uk)
