Where is the border between real and imagined? In The Ocean at the End of the Lane, imagination cannot be trusted. This makes for an unsettling family show and not one for the fainthearted (or the under-12s). Neil Gaiman’s novel for young adults was published in 2013 and Joel Horwood’s adaptation was a hit for the National in 2019 – the transfer to the West End put on hold by the pandemic. This scarily arresting production opens on a glittery black thicket, arching over a wide aisle of stage that leads nowhere. James Bamford plays Boy, a bookworm who reads to escape his broken family, with nervy zeal. His mother has died, the lodger has killed himself in a car crash and a woman with designs on his dad has moved in.
A black backdrop renders the domestic scenes unconventional (even the toast is reliably burnt and smokes hellishly). Throughout, designer Fly Davis honours the idea that what is imagined is as much about terror as salvation. Gaiman reveals, in a programme essay, that the story’s “interior landscape” is autobiographical, and it is this landscape that is externalised, with bold theatricality, by director Katy Rudd, lighting designer Paule Constable and a new cast.
Boy ignores his annoying Sis (a convincing Grace Hogg-Robinson) to make friends with Lettie Hempstock, played by Nia Towle with radiant warmth. Lettie is no ordinary girl next door. The Hempstocks, a farming family, seem to exist outside time and be possessed of an outlaw wisdom. They are presided over by long-haired, clairvoyant Old Mrs Hempstock (“I remember when the moon was made”), played with eccentric verve by Penny Layden. But it is Nicolas Tennant as Boy’s father (doubling as a grown-up version of Boy) who makes the show credible, as an entertaining, troubling, shambolic presence who takes bad parenting decisions at every turn.
Gaiman reminds us that knowing how, what and whom to believe are key challenges growing up. But in his world, this is complicated by primeval monsters: a larger-than-life flea with ravaged bones and ripped wings made me duck my head like a frightened child. The puppetry is phenomenal (directed by Finn Caldwell). Boy, taking a hint from CS Lewis’s cupboard leading to Narnia, decants himself through a window in what proves to be a terrifying miscalculation when his father’s fancy woman – Laura Rogers – descends, like a human puppet, looking somewhere between a Stepford wife and a corrupt Mary Poppins. Thankfully, the show has its doses of curative magic too. I particularly loved the idea that the fabric of family life could be restored by needlework – Old Mrs Hemstock’s invisible mending.
Little Scratch is based on Rebecca Watson’s much-hailed and original debut novel, published last year. Four actors stand behind microphones as if about to sing, and what follows amounts to spoken music, a quartet directed – or conducted – by Katie Mitchell with perfect pitch. This is an interior monologue that follows a day in the life of a young woman (you would not expect it to translate to theatre at all). But the four actors play the woman and each exists like a layer of her mind, a competing thought, part of the whole. The overlaying sound effect is extraordinary.
Her thoughts include entertainingly pedestrian shorthand about the mechanics of the morning: putting on tights, “push… wiggling… in!”, tube travel, checking a boyfriend’s movements on WhatsApp (“two grey ticks…”) and watching the clock. But the point is that this is a private mind unedited, exposed, revealing – on the loo, in a lift, in bed. The text is by turns banal, fresh, sexual, entertaining, devastating – always in the present tense. But what Miriam Battye’s accomplished adaptation awakens, above all, is outrage.
The young woman has been raped by her boss (the “little scratch” refers to her self-harming). The wonderful Eve Ponsonby’s light-filled presence makes what she describes – her boss as predator, herself as prey – all the more distressing. She is unerringly supported by Eleanor Henderson, Morónkẹ́ Akinọlá and Ragevan Vasan (it’s pleasingly thought-provoking to stir a male voice into the mix). The irony of a play that speaks out about not being able to speak out intensifies as the evening advances. There is not a false note anywhere. I’ve never seen – heard – anything like it.
It might, all the same, be fair to add that Little Scratch would not exist had Beckett, master of monologues, never put pen to paper. His plays are defined by desertion, as if his characters were the last people on Earth. In Footfalls (1976), an anguished middle-aged woman, May, in a grey cardigan (brilliantly played, with pinched anguish, by Charlotte Emmerson) paces up and down. The click of her heels is like the ticking of a clock. The marking of time is crucial to an evening that lasts 40 minutes but invokes eternity. May is carer for her mother, outstandingly played by Siân Phillips, who makes the maternal dangerous in a disembodied voice that exerts spooky control: “There is no sleep so deep I wouldn’t hear you there,” she confesses – the most unreassuring of assurances.
Rockaby (1981) works as a lonely companion piece to Footfalls, a hopeless lullaby in which an old woman in a rocking chair approaches death. Beckett’s disturbed syntax is suggestive of a body breaking down. The word “end” proves repeatedly inconclusive, a conjunction, a desperate continuation. Phillips sounds civilised, composed, her consoling voice in contrast to her comfortless lines. You notice in particular the absence of the first person, as if “I” were a luxury that could no longer be afforded. The Jermyn Street theatre is to be congratulated on recruiting such star turns, intently directed by Richard Beecham, to an extraordinarily bleak mid-autumn project.
Star ratings (out of five)
The Ocean at the End of the Lane ★★★★
Little Scratch ★★★★★
Footfalls/Rockaby ★★★★
The Ocean at the End of the Lane is at the Duke of York’s, London, until 12 February
Little Scratch is at Hampstead Theatre Downstairs, London, until 11 December
Footfalls/Rockaby is at Jermyn Street theatre, London, until 20 November
