Why There Are Three One Of A Kind Alvin Sputniks

The first time St John Cowcher played Alvin Sputnik — deep sea explorer, widower, humanity's last hope, romantic — he'd had a week's practice, and was performing the one-man show in Singapore in 2013.

"With arts funding being what it is, even back in 2013 before we'd lost a bunch of it, we only had limited money and they could only afford to pay me and hire space for a week of rehearsals, so that's all the time we had. I'd done a few school shows in the last two days of that week as a way of being comfortable doing the show before an audience. It was seven days of manic line learning and trying to figure out all the technical minutiae of the show. But we got it all up and polished."

"The two places that I loved going the most was a town called Bergen in Norway, which is on the North Sea coast and rainy and beautiful; and I also went to Izmir in Turkey, which is on the Mediterranean, and that was miles from anywhere but lovely."

The work of Tim Watts in collaboration with Arielle Gray, The Adventures Of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer involves a charming and unlikely combination of mime, puppetry, live and recorded music, and animation.

Since its debut in 2009 at Perth's Blue Room Theatre with Watts in the titular role, it's played in Sydney, Melbourne, Edinburgh, Dublin, Seoul, Taipei, Auckland, and New York, among others, and collected numerous awards.

With more than 300 performances and counting, the continued popularity of and demand for the show became such that Watts had to recruit more Alvins if he was ever to find time to work on something new; enter Cowcher and Sam Longley.

"Tim had reached that point where he wanted to do other stuff, but the show still has life. Both Sam and I have done it multiple times in multiple countries across the world now," says Cowcher. "The two places that I loved going the most was a town called Bergen in Norway, which is on the North Sea coast and rainy and beautiful; and I also went to Izmir in Turkey, which is on the Mediterranean, and that was miles from anywhere but lovely."

While he has lost track of an exact count of the times he has performed the show, but puts the figure "in the realm of about 100, 150 shows".

With Watts, Cowcher and Longley all taking on the role of Alvin at different times, Cowcher says each has developed a different aspect of Alvin's personality.

"It helps that both me and Sam perform it and so we get to see each other perform it and are reminded that there are other aspects to Alvin, you know? He almost has these three personalities because of the three performers. Sam's Alvin is clownish but beautifully joyous, and Tim's has this beautiful wonderment at the world, this sort of naive joy at discovery, and mine's a little bit, uh," Cowcher draws out the utterance, searching for the right word, laughs a little. "He's a little bit anxious, at times, but he still has that joy. Maybe it's an insight into us as performers. He's always Alvin, but there's different interpretations."