The Ocean at the End of the Lane follows a young boy whose life is interrupted by a monstrous, rotten creature – a colossal puppet too big to fit in the rehearsal room – that is intent on destroying him. ‘It’s about memory and the imagination and standing up to the dark’: Neil Gaiman. “That scene you just saw … ” she stops herself from giving the secrets away, “in the new theatre, it will feel like mass destruction.” “I’ve found moments where things come from behind and around you,” she says. “You always want to keep mining a piece and discovering new things about it.” When the show was at the Dorfman, the National Theatre’s smallest space, the audience were immersed on three sides in the West End, Rudd is determined to keep the sense of intimacy. “As a director, you’re never like: ‘That’s it,’” says the show’s director Katy Rudd. With a new cast and different staging this time round, can they re-bottle the lighting? Now the team are preparing to install the vastnessof an ocean in the Duke of York’s Theatre. The sellout production was supposed to transfer last year, but the pandemic got in the way. “I knew it was going to be good, but I didn’t know it was going to be magic,” Gaiman laughs, recalling the original staging of his monster-riddled, grief-stricken story at the Dorfman theatre.
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