The Ocean at the End of the Lane promises something truly special

From the imagination of Neil Gaiman, best-selling author of Good Omens, Coraline and The Sandman, it comes billed as a tour de force of magic and storytelling –an epic journey to a childhood once forgotten.

Finty Williams, who plays Old Mrs Hempstock, is loving the experience: “His stories are predominantly stories for young adults and for adults. They're not children's books as such but The Ocean at the End of the Lane deals with memory and how two people can experience the same thing and yet both have very different memories of it. It's about a man who returns to a place for his father's funeral and gets drawn to this farm. The farm is in Sussex but you can take that to be whatever you want it to be and whatever you want it to mean. It doesn't have to be exactly Sussex. But he gets taken back to when he was 12 and what happened to him then, who he met and how he dealt with growing up and friendship and life and loss. It is a complicated piece. It's like a well-crafted song. You can hear a song when you're 16 and you can play it and think that you understand it but the older you get, the more you can read into it and the more you can see in it. And I think this is the same. You can come and watch this at the age of 13 and still take away lots of things from it but I think if you come and watch it and you're in your 60s then you'll take away lots of different things from it.

“It has got amazing music and extraordinary puppets and extraordinary people that will make you see and believe things that you would just not have thought possible in a theatre. I'm lucky enough that I get to watch quite a lot of it and we've done nearly 200 performances now. We started in Salford in December last year.”

And for Finty, daughter of Dame Judi Dench and Michael Williams, theatre is absolutely where she wants to be: “I don't really like it when somebody points a camera in my face. I don't really like someone taking a photo but I love the fact that when you're in the theatre for two and a half hours you can become anybody. Sometimes in my mind I'm maybe not the age I am or the shape I am. People can connect with other people.”

And obviously it is great that the pandemic is now finally over. Finty admits that she was genuinely fearful that the theatre might not ever come back: “And then my son took me to see the musical SIX in that summer when we were allowed to come back a bit and it was absolutely joyous. It was the August of that terrible year and there was social distancing and we had to wear masks but I don't think I've ever been as affected by seeing something in the theatre as I was with that show and not just because it was that show. It was just the feeling of being back in the theatre. You forget that we just did not know in the moment whether we would ever come back but it was just so fabulous to be in the theatre because you're sharing that evening with everyone and you know that it will never be exactly the same, that if you come back the next day it will be different. So yes I do think that the pandemic gave me a whole new appreciation of theatre and just being able to do it.”

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