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Duke of York’s; Hampstead Theatre Downstairs; Jermyn Street, LondonThe National’s striking Neil Gaiman adaptation sweeps into the West End. A day inside the mind of a traumatised woman sounds like nothing else. And Siân Phillips heads a classy Beckett double bill 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. Continue reading...