Stage adaptation of Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane heads to Yorkshire

“I get bored easily,” Gaiman told me, leaving me to wonder if I’d overstepped a line. Fortunately, he added: “It’s partly that and partly that I feel like I have a limited amount of time on this earth and it feels like I’ve been locked accidentally in a sweet shop and I want to get my fist into as many bottles as I can before they open the shop in the morning. When I was 15 I made a list of all the things I wanted to do and I showed it to my mum – I wanted to write an episode of Dr Who, write a novel, a graphic novel and I think I have done them all.”

The latest thing to add to the list is a national tour of the above adaptation, which arrives at Bradford Alhambra next week. The award- winning book was unusual for Gaiman when it was published in 2013 in that it drew on Gaiman’s real life rather than his extraordinary imagination.

“The book began with me wanting to try and explain to my wife where I grew up and what that world was like,” he says. “She could take me to her childhood home because it’s still the same, but I couldn’t take her to where I grew up (in East Grinstead) because the place had long since been demolished; lots of lovely neat little housing estates covered the gardens and the fields and lanes. So for me it was kind of an effort to try and evoke a past and a sense of place. An interesting side of it for me too was that I realised that I hadn’t heard, for a very long time, the Sussex accent of my childhood. Mrs Weller came in and cleaned once a week and Mr Weller came in and did the gardens. They were probably in their 80s and they had proper Sussex accents – almost like a West Country burr. I resolved to write a novel with that in too.”

The book tells the story a man returning to his childhood home and finds himself standing beside a pond of the old Sussex farmhouse where he used to play. He is suddenly transported to his 12th birthday when his remarkable friend Lettie claimed that what lay before them was not a pond but in fact, the ocean. Plunged into a magical world, their survival depends on their ability to reckon with ancient forces that threaten to destroy everything around them.

The story has been adapted for the stage by Joel Horwood. Gaiman says: “I don’t think I’ve ever been able to avoid writing about family, even when I thought I was writing about something else. Whether it’s biological family or the family we make. In the novel I created a semi-fictional family for myself, and in the play version it was one step further away from my family, which I think looking back on is incredibly healthy. But the boy is definitely me.”For Gaiman the stage version does something quite unusual: given the parameters, anyone who has seen a stage adaptation of their favourite book will understand – reality can rarely live up to the imagination. Gaiman felt the stage version was able to sincerely capture the magic of the book; the theatricality of many of the moments on stage deeply moving him.

“There is something astounding about the moment when they enter the ocean. That completely fascinates me. And you’re going to see miracles made out of bits of rubbish and old plastic bags and nightmarish birds beyond your imagination. It still takes me by surprise every time I watch.”

Touring for a total of 40 weeks, this is the largest tour mounted by the National Theatre since before the pandemic. It follows a celebrated six-month run of The Ocean at the End of the Lane at the Duke of York’s Theatre in the West End, which opened in November 2021 after the production received its world premiere in the Dorfman Theatre in late 2019.

“It’s a story about about memory, magic, family. It’s about who you were and who you are. It’s not like anything else I’ve ever been involved in. It’s not like anything else you’ll ever see at the theatre. The Ocean at the End of the Lane has its own theatrical magic.”

Bradford Alhambra, April 4-8. Sheffield Crucible, May 9-20.