Pippa Nixon, as Ursula, is one of the drama’s most dangerous and determined monsters, even if she looks like a 1950s homemaker in pink heels. The book’s Ursula Monkton has become the nanny, albeit an evil one who has wormed her way into the household.

Like a white witch from an Angela Carter story … Josie Walker in The Ocean at the End of The Lane. When Boy asks her age, she replies: “I remember when the moon was made.” Old Mrs Hempstock (Josie Walker) is the wackiest and most characterful figure with long white hair and formidable powers to warp time, she appears like a white witch from an Angela Carter story with comic edges. The Hempstocks are a quirky trio: a magical matriarchy of sorts whose youngest, Lettie (Marli Siu) is sweet enough, though her friendship with Boy seems relatively unexplained, both in the book and here. The production keeps some of the book’s darkness, including a suicide and a shocking scene of child abuse but the boy, just named Boy and energetically played by Samuel Blenkin, is older here and a marital infidelity has been excised from the plot, presumably to make the drama more wholesome.

The Dorfman theatre’s stage has ramps along two sides and turns from a kitchen or bedroom to an alternate world of raging creatures emerging out of the foliage at the back. The production captures Gaiman’s fast-paced storytelling, and Fly Davis’s stage design does not let up in its visual imagination, bringing the story’s magic to life extraordinarily well. There is no shortage of imagination in Neil Gaiman’s 2013 novel nor in this monster-powered, adrenaline-filled spectacular stage version, adapted by Joel Horwood and dynamically directed by Katy Rudd.

The ocean at end of the lane