The Ocean at the End of the Lane — love, loss and monsters at the Duke of York’s

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Duke of York’s theatre, london

A man slips away from his father’s funeral to a childhood haunt: an old duck pond near his family home. Suddenly the years peel away and he’s his 12-year-old self again, reliving a period of bewildering change.

So begins the National Theatre’s superlative staging of Neil Gaiman’s novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane. It was excellent at its first outing in December 2019; now finally making its West End debut at the Duke of York’s Theatre, it seems to have grown, charged perhaps with the reflective depth the pandemic has brought. It’s still spectacular, peopling the stage with the sort of terrifying, half-perceived monsters that can haunt our nightmares. But more striking yet is its emotional core, which now feels even deeper.

This is a play about grief, love and loss, eloquent on the interplay between memory and fiction and serious about the size of imagination in a child’s reality. Rather than rationalise the boy’s fears and hopes, it embraces them, pitching us with him into an uncertain world where fantasy and reality collide. That becomes immensely moving, as does the double vision created by the framework: looking back, what can the adult protagonist make of his memories?

As the present slides away, we’re back with the unnamed boy on his 12th birthday. His home life is in turmoil, his family reeling from this mother’s death, his father frayed and distracted. When the lodger kills himself, things go from bad to worse. It’s then that our protagonist meets Lettie Hempstock from the neighbouring farm, a young girl who appears to have magical powers. Soon the two of them are battling something evil and predatory intent on invading the human space.

What’s so brilliant about Katy Rudd’s staging is that it keeps all options open. Perhaps it’s true that a hideous otherworldly creature does (literally) worm its way through the boy’s hand and into his household, assuming the seductive form of Ursula, a pretty woman who beguiles his dad and his sister. Or perhaps we’re in the traumatised imagination of a shy, bookish boy, struggling to comprehend the darkness of death. Or perhaps it is his adult mind, digging up and transposing a long-buried memory about a grim time when his father became abusive (the double casting of Nicolas Tennant as both father and adult son hints at this).

On stage, interior and exterior landscapes overlap, just as they do in memory, and something is no less real for being imagined. The boy seeks refuge in stories, all of them pitched on the threshold between this world and another. Rudd’s staging takes this as its key. Thresholds and portals loom large in Fly Davis’s set: at home, doors move and multiply in nightmare fashion to allow Ursula to keep bursting in on him (a transfixing bit of stagecraft); a window offers escape; thickets on the farm yield up terrifying, shape-shifting creatures composed of rags and shards and beaks (designed by Samuel Wyer).

Meanwhile the Hempstock farm kitchen is a warm, yearned-for matriarchal haven, presided over by a wise female trio who can mend hurts, vanquish monsters and even outwit time, snipping and stitching memories to erase the bad.

It’s all sympathetically realised in Rudd’s production. James Bamford’s coltish protagonist conveys lonely longing; Nia Towle’s Lettie combines youthful zeal with a grounded wisdom older than her years; Laura Rogers’s Ursula is silkily sinister. The stage crew, visible throughout, reveal how the effects are created without detracting from their power, amplifying on stage the mysteries of the book. Beautiful.

★★★★☆

To May 14 2022, nationaltheatre.org.uk

Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of)

Criterion theatre, london

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Pride and Prejudice must be frequently dramatised (and that any review of said dramatisation must reference the novel’s famous opening line . . .) Enter London’s Criterion Theatre, then, and everything seems in place for a pleasing rendition of Jane Austen’s beloved masterpiece.

There’s the gracious curving staircase, there’s the plumped sofa, there’s the chandelier, there’s the yellow rubber glove dangling from the chandelier . . . “Don’t worry, we’ve not started yet,” cries a Scottish serving girl in cream petticoat and Doc Marten boots as she and her fellow maidservants try frantically to retrieve said glove and scurry round the stage tidying piles of books and flapping a feather duster at the fixtures and fittings.

And that sets the tone for Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of), a mischievous, joyous new take on the novel that mashes up Austen’s story with beady below-stairs commentary and a dollop of 21st-century sensibility. Isobel McArthur’s script (first seen at Glasgow’s Tron Theatre and co-directed by McArthur and Simon Harvey) splices the original dialogue with robust interjections from our team of servants. They start by reminding us how crucial they are to the plot — delivering letters (slowly); filling glasses (quickly) — and that, of course, “we’ve seen absolutely everyone naked”.

The five women then take ownership of telling the story, playing all the parts, switching costumes, bursting into karaoke and deploying dozens of running gags. Rubbish goes into a Jane Aust-bin; Mr Bennet is depicted as a silent armchair and a newspaper (wheeled out of a cupboard for his serial “no-comment” appearances) and when Jane (Christina Gordon) is dumped by Mr Bingley, McArthur’s Mrs Bennet collapses in disheveled woe, eating her way despondently through a huge tin of Quality Street chocolates.

What’s remarkable is that, for all the high jinks and irreverent anachronisms, the spirit of the novel comes through. The characterisation is sharp (Hannah Jarrett-Scott particularly enjoyable as both Bingley siblings, when not tidying up or playing the trumpet); the songs judiciously chosen. Here is Austen’s shrewd critique of society and women’s financial plight, whipped together with smart contemporary feminism — down to the fact that the all-woman company literally sprint around the set to present the male characters. “You know who I can’t stand? People,” growls McArthur’s ramrod stiff Darcy as he arrives at the local ball.

Even more astonishingly, the show honours the emotional heart of the novel: you’re soon rooting for the mixed-up lovers and feeling for the left-behind. It’s an exuberant, irresistible piece of theatre that reminds us that we most love Austen’s characters not for their bonnets and balls, but because they are so like us.

★★★★☆

To April 17 2022, prideandprejudicesortof.com

Six

Vaudeville theatre, london

More long overdue payback comes at the hands of Six (at the Vaudeville Theatre), finally back in the West End after a torrid time during the pandemic. Here the six in question are the wives of Henry VIII, back to wrestle their stories from the footnotes of history and their reduction to their respective fates.

Brushing aside the tinkling strains of “Greensleeves”, they stride on to the stage in a blaze of light, attitude and mini-farthingales, channelling that other great royal — Queen Bey — and launch into a riotous 75-minute musical gig (by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss) that merges Tudor history with pop numbers, power ballads and steamy jazz.

Like Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of), the show finds its biting point in the tensions and crossovers between then and now. We hear the women’s voices through songs that echo many of the girl-power queens — Beyoncé, Rihanna, Ariana, Adele, Taylor — and that find modern parallels with their experience: Anna of Cleves, rejected because she doesn’t match her profile picture; Jane Howard, groomed, abused and then labelled a slut. And what starts as a competition as to who had the worst experience finally becomes an affirmative exercise in female solidarity.

Delivered with terrific panache by the cast (Jarnéia Richard-Noel, Courtney Bowman, Natalie Paris, Alexia McIntosh, Sophie Isaacs and Danielle Steers) and their female band, it’s a blast. Who run the West End? Girls.

★★★★☆

To May 1 2022, then touring, sixthemusical.com