Something Very Far Away
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Something Very Far Away

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What makes it even more remarkable is that the show’s being brought to the stage by the Unicorn Theatre, Britain’s most famous and longstanding youth theatre company, and that is some heavy shit for anyone to ponder, let alone a kid. However, Arends’ policy is that kids are smart and don’t need to be patronised or coddled. “I was always a bit worried that they wouldn’t engage with this subject matter or that it’d be too complex emotionally,” Arends recalls. “However, that’s never been the case. Children are capable of giving emotionally intelligent responses, even from a young age.”

Arends has a very clear recollection of what prompted this journey. It all started with his first gig in youth theatre working on Will Tuckett’s production of Marianne Dreams. In fact, he found the experience so remarkable that he subsequently described it as better than any job he’d ever had before. That is damn high praise – what made it so special? “That was in 2008 and by that time I’d already been working as an actor for about six or seven years doing a range of theatre,” he recalls. “During that production I was playing a character who had contracted a disease, which meant that he couldn’t use his legs. The tipping point for me was at the end of one show when a mother with a child came up and asked me to show that my legs were okay. Her child had been so spellbound during the production that he couldn’t believe that it wasn’t real and he was so relieved to find out that my legs were alright. It was just amazing for me to think that I could perform for an audience so invested in what was going on on-stage that they had to be persuaded afterwards that it wasn’t real.” 

It was after that show that Arends started to toy with the idea of creating his own work. He started out by writing some short stories, but realised that they were all somewhat dark. In fact, it was that very darkness that compelled him to develop Something Very Far Away. “I think it’s important to discuss these complicated issues in theatres,” Arends reflects. “It’s not my job to educate, but what I can do is talk in metaphors that opens things up for discussion with parents and grandparents. I wanted to open up conversations about these really difficult things.”

It’s also a show that captivates adults. Engaging children and entertaining adults at the same time is not an easy maneuver. Arends observes that Pixar, Aardman and French director Sylvain Chomet (The Illusionist) do it particularly well, but so does he. So, what’s the magic formula? “It’s fairly important to know who you’re speaking to and what you’re trying to say,” Arends muses. “If you get the children properly, then you get the adults for free.”

That statement rings true for anyone who ever watched something like the Muppets with their folks, which is a neat segue to the fact that Something Very Far Away is in fact a puppet show. For a while Arends wasn’t certain about how the story was going to unfold. “It wasn’t as though it was going to involve puppetry from day one,” he recollects. “It could have been a picture book or a film. I played with quite a few other ideas for a while. However, as a child, I was a huge Star Wars and Red Dwarf fan – those epic space sets. So, I started to toy with that. In this show, we work on stage with miniature models and puppets. The audience can see us working at the same time a huge space set is projected on a screen above. The whole production marries hi-fi and lo-fi. It’s live animation really and a bit like watching a silent movie.”

BY MEG CRAWFORD