Review: The Ocean at the End of the Lane at the Lyceum, Sheffield

Which defining moments – happy, horrifying – stick in our psyches, their sharp talon claws hooking themselves in whether we wish them to or not?

Why do those snapshots become the ones that linger, and not so many of the others?

If you haven’t read Neil Gaiman’s 2013 book on which this breathtaking play is based, if you don’t rank ‘fantasy’ among your favourite literary genres, don’t be put off.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is as disarmingly real as it is escapist, and one of the most powerful, visually spectacular, thought-provoking plays you will see.

It’s affecting and spine-chilling, a masterpiece of staging, scenery and story-telling – the definition of true theatre.

The acclaimed production, in Sheffield for the next week, opened in 2019 to rave reviews at the National Theatre, moved to the West End, and is now halfway through a UK tour.

On the day of his father’s funeral, his memories heightened and raw from grief, a man revisits the village where he grew up.

Standing beside a duck pond – the ‘ocean’ at the end of the lane – he is transported back to being 12, when he met his childhood friend, Lettie Hempstock, an enigmatic girl played with childlike exuberance by Millie Hikasa, who has all the answers but dodges the question when he asks her age.

Maybe, like her omniscient white witch grandmother played by Finty Williams, and the ancient woodland farmhouse where they live, she is as old as time itself.

Keir Ogilvy plays lonely, bookish Boy (he is given no name) who immerses himself in fairytales like The Chronicles of Narnia and Alice in Wonderland, stories where characters slip – through a wardrobe, down a rabbit hole – from one world into the next.

Of course every fairytale must have a villain, a wicked stepmother wheedling her way between widower and child, and Charlie Brooks – expert in evil from her years as Janine in EastEnders – plays the part of Ursula with spine-chilling perfection.

Her sinister arrival is heralded by the finding of 50ps in places they shouldn’t be, like a conjurer pulling coins from behind a child’s ear, and she inveigles her way in with bribes and flattery.

Is Ursula really the manifestation of malevolence? Or is that just a vivid backstory, dreamt up by a child with an incredible imagination, who locks himself away with books to escape the sadness and solitude of his own life.

Just as in Gaiman’s novel turned horror fantasy film Coraline, the mundane is mixed with magic to create unsettling unease.

Boy describes a birthday party, to which none of his ‘friends’ turned up. It’s the most horrible ignominy a child could face. But the even worse horror is happening to him daily: his mother has died, and his emotionally detached father, played by Trevor Fox, is doing his best to carry on, burning the toast, losing his tie, making lame jokes, struggling to connect, clutching at comfort in the bosom of a stranger, drowning in a sea of grief.

The play explores the line between fact and fantasy, between what is said and what goes unspoken, between childhood imagination and adult reality, between life and death. It’s the dark thoughts you have in childhood, the gothic obsessions, the scary surrealist dreams that feel so real you can remember them now.

It’s a child’s wonder at the universe, of wormholes and dark matter, of folklore and the paranormal, of being a child who is misunderstood and punished by adults who do not listen, who have forgotten what it was to be a child.

The set design by Fly Davis is a work of genius, out of this world, yet grounded in the everyday. Plain, simple, ordinary doors – nothing scary about a door, surely? – become portals, and are deployed with all the terror of the giant monsters which pluck the innards out of their prey.

A scene where the doors multiply and replicate, and Ursula moves in and out with inexplicable speed, is brilliantly terrifying. An ordinary dressing gown hanging on the back of a door is transformed into something gasp-out-loud ghastly.

The cast don’t just act – the play, by the producers of War Horse, is also puppetry and performance art, with all the strong, graceful movement of modern dance.

A supporting ensemble dressed in black lift characters so they appear to be levitating, contort the writhing puppet beasts that are the hellish monsters of a child’s nightmares, and move scenery on and off stage so deftly that props are elevated to art installation.

Monsters there may be in them-there woods, but the real monsters are the ones in our imaginings, the hazy memories of childhood you can’t quite place but which hold emotions you can barely articulate.

And, like memories, this is a production that will stay with you long after the monsters have gone.

• The Ocean at the End of the Lane is at the Lyceum, Sheffield, until Saturday, May 20.