15 – 19 August
There is no such thing as retrieved memory: for something to be a memory as opposed to an imaginative experience, there has to be an unbroken causal link between the memory and the event that caused it. Forgetting and then remembering doesn’t mean the link is broken. Knowing that something happened, but not being able to recall it in any detail until something jogs your memory is just that, a failure to recall. The link is still there. However if someone convinces you that something happened when it actually did, but you have no recollection of it happening, that’s not remembering, that’s not a memory. Similarly, if you recall an imaginative experience – flying your bed at night to exotic locations, for example – you’re not remembering a flying experience, just the imaginative one. Your memories are private and personal, no one can tell you that you have a memory, it cannot be planted in your mind by someone, it is in a real and very important sense a part of who you are. Our identities are intimately bound with our memories.
Joel Horwood’s adaptiopn of Neil Gaiman’s story explores the hinterland between the factual and the imaginative; the making of a person’s interior life, of their identity. It starts with a trigger to Dad’s memory by one of those emotional upheavals that follow the death of a loved one. Dad (Trevor Fox) is burying his own father when he is jogged into memories of his past and the land of his childhood where a duck-pond at the end of the lane was transmuted in his imagination into an ocean. Where a local family of farmers became guardians of the portal between the real and the imaginary world and their daughter, Lettie (Millie Hikasa) became his dragoman to the strange world of imaginary beings. His young self, Boy (Keir Ogilvy) at once baffled, confused and energised by the strange world he has entered, struggles to accommodate the two worlds which appear to become interlinked in the shape of the new lodger, Ursula (Charlie Brooks) who he views as a malign presence in the household.
Emma-Jane Goodwin as Old Mrs Hempstock (standing in for an indisposed Finty Williams) is every inch the kind of gnarled matriarch that scares the bejeezus out of young minds when not actually offering the balm of age.
The staging of this production with its fabulous, giant, bat-spider-like monsters, magical forests and illusory interiors, bring the interior world of Boy’s imagination to life. With a powerful score from Jherek Bischoff, some cunning stage illusion, dramatic puppetry and beautifully considered lighting the production is a showcase for the possibilities of live theatre.
★★★★☆ Graham Wyles, 16 August 2023
Photo credit: Brinkhoff-Moegenburg
