Two years after an acclaimed sell out season at The Blue Room Tim Watts’ one man show returns home for a second showing in Perth. This time round the show will be in the larger Studio Underground at the State Theatre Centre as the final production of the Perth Theatre Company’s 2011 season.
The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer is a creative mix of puppetry, animation, mime, song and performance, all carefully interwoven. Set in the future, in a world covered in water the solitary Alvin Sputnik heads off to explore the world. Watching the show you can’t help but feel as if you’re standing on a storytelling cliff edge, as you realise that if Watts’ hits one button out of sequence or accidently leaves a prop in the wrong spot the show will fail, it’s a precision performance.
Since its debut in Perth the show has toured around the world picking up awards at the New York Fridge Festival and just last month it had critics raving at The Edinburgh Fringe. Creator and Performer Tim Watts spoke to OUTinPerth over a coffee in North Perth.
How’s the show changed since it was first performed at The Blue Room?
It has changed. Some people who’ve seen the original and then seen the show as it is now don’t notice the changes but there have been huge changes. The sets have been improved and the animation is a lot more integrated into the puppetry and there are a few extra scenes and some scenes have been cut. It’s the same story and the same kind of show. We’re always changing and improving stuff and even before we return to Perth to perform it there are things I’d like to change.
Do you know how many performances there have been?
I think the opening night in Perth might be the 250th performance. Currently we’ve done 230 and we’re about to go to New Zealand and then a couple of shows in Melbourne. I think there’s 19 which will make the first night in Perth the 250th show.
It’s a pretty phenomenal journey from you mucking about in a workshop a few years ago to now touring around the world.
It’s a huge journey and every step of the way I keep getting surprised by people wanting to help me out and give me more seasons. You make a show, to have a life beyond hopefully, and you want it to be good and people to like it – and you have these expectations but it’s just been really ridiculous surpassing all of those expectations.
When you created the show were you deliberately thinking of something that could easily tour the world?
I was thinking logistics, I was thinking that I can’t afford to travel and tour a show that’s expensive to tour and I wanted to take a show across to the New York fringe, so there was a bunch of different things I thought about. One was financial, if it’s cheap for me to tour that means I can go to more places. Also if I bring and operate my own tech, because when you have to use the tech that’s there often you don’t get it to how you want it to be. I thought if I bring my own lights and I operate everything then I don’t have to rely on other people.
It is scary doing a live show that relies on technology. I did all the programming of the animation myself and I’m not a programmer, and there are a lot of flaws in it. If I accidently hit a button and the wrong time or double hit a button, this has happened a couple of times; I can skip large chunks of the show and not be able to go back. I’ve done it a couple of times but only once has it really affected the show. Once I skipped the entire ending of the show and had to come out and narrate what would have happened.
What the most interesting place you’ve taken the show to?
The most interesting place has been India, that’s a place where technology failed. In India they have rolling blackouts so half way through the show we lost power and we had to stop, so I came out and sang songs on the ukulele until the power came back on. After the show we discovered that it wasn’t a rolling blackout, a cleaner had just turned off the power.
On day in India we had really low numbers, we did three performances and all the numbers were really low. Later that week we found out that the theatre was actually closed that day, but no one had told us.
The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer returns to Perth as part of the Perth Theatre Company’s season at the Theatre Underground at the State Theatre Centre from Nov 22 to Dec 3.
Graeme Watson
