Something Very Far Away

This lovely fellow is Johannes Kepler, who travels in his rocket ship So Far Away into the Universe that he finds it still Under Construction.  He is trying to look back at life on Earth, to a time before his sweet Tomasina perished in an accident with a performing horse at the circus.

Something Very Far Away was a 35 minute show for children, performed at the Unicorn Theatre. It featured the puppets of Matthew Robins, the creator of Fly Boy, and was written by Mark Arends.  It was similar to the work of Paper Cinema in that the mechanics of the work is privileged, and that's where the magic lay. Nearest the audience were four live cameras, lots of cables, the puppeteers, their puppets in a row, a mirror ball, a guitar, sparklers waiting to be lit and a holey bucketful of water.  It's performed on a small scale, but the theatre was also tiny so we could see clearly what's coming and how they were doing it.  The projection of the story, mixed from the cameras was almost secondary to the absorbing spectacle of the clever performers and their carefully timed tricks and changes.