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The Ocean at the End of the Lane
The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Gareth K Vile
Perhaps unsurprisingly for an author who gained his fame writing for comic books, Neil Gaiman’s stories often struggle to resolve the problem first identified by Umberto Eco in The Myth of Superman. Drawing on mythology and its familiar tropes – in the case of The Ocean at the End of the Lane, these include a female trinity of virgin, mother and crone, a defensive circle against demonic attack, a generic descent into the otherworld by the hero and the reassertion of a status quo – Gaiman lends his characters a naturalistic psychology that undermines the broad scope of the myth and introduces an unpredictability that is grounded in human relationships rather than myth’s typically symbolic meanings.
The theatrical production of Ocean has a parallel tension between the demands of performance and the episodic narrative of the novel: there is plenty of movement between locations on stage and the conversations between families, so important in a book, are leaden and dull in the context of a drama that features moments of spectacle and supernatural threat. Both of these sets of tensions leave the production uneven, with the pace faltering in the second acts and the magical intrusions of puppetry casting a shadow over the more verbose scenes.
The strength of the production lies with its visual appeal: lighting and scenography combine in an austere and suggestive setting that uses harsh fluorescent lighting to capture a constricting domesticity and a sparkling, luminous chiaroscuro for the supernatural scenes. Battles against demonic forces are rendered through energetic physical choreography – another example of how language often offers an inferior theatricality to movement – and the appearance of the monster in the first act adapts a puppetry of swirling fabrics and multiple puppeteers both to imitate Gaiman’s evocative description in the novel and present a kind of discorporating physicality, limbs barely attached to the trunk, shapes twisting.
A further scene – the protagonists’ connection to the universal source of life and meaning – uses two small marionettes: once again, the puppets display a visceral otherness, providing the production with a sense of magic and possibility. If the weakness of the plot comes from Gaiman’s inability to reconcile myth and fiction, the dramaturgy is redeemed by a brilliant visual aesthetic, and a calculated use of the puppet, which takes its place as a mediator between worlds, the uncanny presence of the inanimate leaning into its familiar ambiguity between the living and the dead. It suits the cosmic themes of the script, and lends the production a palpable sense of wonder, escaping from the family tribulations that the imaginative world attempts to explore.
