While in the ‘hood, he revisits a pond near an ancient farmhouse where he used to play… and we’re swiftly transported back to the man’s 12 th birthday, a year after his mother had died, back in the days when new best friend Lettie claimed that the pond wasn’t a pond, but an ocean of possibility, for better or worse. The tortuous tale begins with a middle-aged man returning to his childhood home for his father’s funeral. There was no point in asking the people I was with for their thoughts on it – as the drama’s key character Old Mrs Hempstock (you’ll hear more about her later) said, at one point: “Different people remember things differently, and you’ll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.” And in the case of this production, what you think might be the most memorable highlights of your evening in the company of Gaiman’s imagination turned into fantastical theatrical flesh might well turn out not to be the apogees you thought they’d be, today… especially if your dreams had been interrupted by nightmares involving shape-shifting monsters, parasitic worms and evil, supernatural ‘fleas’. The morning after the National Theatre’s highly-acclaimed stage adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s 2013 novel The Ocean At The End Of The Lane washed up at the Theatre Royal Bath, only one thought dominated my consciousness: wow, what happened on stage last night?
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