Something Very Far Away – Unicorn Theatre & The Great Gatsby (dir. Baz Luhrmann)

This weekend I saw two things about love, loss, memory, hope, and an attempt by a man to recapture – in one way or another – a woman from his past.

On Friday night I went to the Unicorn Theatre to see Something Very Far Away, a piece of theatre originally intended for children that has gained the attention of a wider audience. Involving puppetry and projection to form live animation, there was no dialogue. Instead, it had a beautifully effective soundtrack including live guitar music alongside recorded pieces from the likes of Sigur Ros.

The following day, I went to the cinema to see the new adaptation of The Great Gatsby, directed by Baz Luhrmann. Visually stunning, with another very effective soundtrack, this film was made all the more moving by my having seen Something Very Far Away the previous day.

I was originally going to write about each of these two pieces separately, but seeing them back to back has linked them in my head and it’s now difficult to think of one without referring to the other. The themes of the two just reflect each other so neatly.

Both pieces look at the lengths (physical and metaphorical) that someone will go to in order to recapture the past. While Gatsby throws elaborate parties in order to attract the attention of his former lover Daisy, in Something Very Far Away our hero builds a rocket and travels into space to look back at Earth. He knows that the further into space you look, the further back in time you see – and all he wants to see is the wife he lost. Again and again, he revisits the pain of her death.

In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby turns his house into a sort of amusement park to attract Daisy, and in Something Very Far Away our unnamed astronomer makes a rocket out of his house, which blasts off into space to let him catch a glimpse of his wife. Both men try to create physical solutions to ease their emotional pain. They are both motivated by their love and loss to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary, and as Nick notes about Gatsby, it is hope that powers them along.

In Something Very Far Away, the puppeteers, cameras and props were all deliberately visible to the audience, so we could see how each piece of animation was created in front of us. And The Great Gatsby also emphasises its own form, what with the story within a story frame, anachronistic soundtrack and made-for-3D flourishes. The construction of the story, or the memory, or the illusion, is revealed in both pieces: we see – physically – how the past seeps into the present and the present seeps into the memory of the past.

Despite this sense of physicality, though, both The Great Gatsby and Something Very Far Away ultimately represent the past as enticing but just out of reach. Gatsby’s green light is always on the other side of the bay, and the astronomer’s wife is always at the other end of the telescope. The last lines from The Great Gatsby struck me as heartbreakingly relevant to both pieces:

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further ... And one fine morning –

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”