Preview: Dinosaur Park, Wardrobe Theatre

This month Superbolt Theatre bring their award-winning, laugh-out-loud spin on Spielberg’s Jurassic Park to the Wardrobe Theatre.
Welcome to the unlikely setting of Lyme Regis Community Centre, where the Park Family embark on a journey to a misty past. Much prehistoric mayhem ensues.
Here’s Superbolt’s co-artistic director, the Bristol-raised Maria Askew, to tell us more.

I grew up in Bristol, where I was heavily involved in the drama scene at Redland High School and was with the Bristol Old Vic Young Company for eight years. Both were crucial in developing my love of theatre.

It was during my time at the Old Vic that I learned about the techniques of the practitioner Jacques Lecoq, which really resonated with me. After studying Theatre at Warwick University, I trained at the Jacques Lecoq International Theatre School in Paris where I met Frode and Simon, Superbolt’s fellow artistic directors.

Our Lecoq training gave us the tools to make our own shows: we developed a shared language, an understanding of how to craft a dynamic scene, the ability to create entertaining characters and an appreciation of the importance of space in telling stories. And so, on graduating in 2011, it felt natural for us to form Superbolt Theatre in my little flat in Paris. We immediately created our first show Centralia, which we brought to Bristol. As our company has grown, we have made more shows, taught workshops and performed internationally, in Australia, Norway, Poland, Switzerland as well as all over the UK.

Dinosaur Park is a low-fi re-enactment of Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, entwined with an original story of the dysfunctional Park family. The Parks are holding a memorial screening in the local community centre in memory of their palaeontologist mother who passed away the year before. When the tape goes missing, they are forced to recreate the film themselves – in very unexpected ways. Their playful, clownesque storytelling is framed with flashbacks of Park family life. It is high-energy, oozing ’90s nostalgia, comedy, dinosaurs, family feuds, music and dancing, and has moments of surprising tenderness.

Dinosaur Park does not require you to be a hardcore Jurassic Park fan – or even a dinosaur fan (although if you are, there is loads in it for you!), but you will get the most from it if you have seen Spielberg’s film. We’ve had an amazing response so far to the show and I can promise a fun, hilarious, heartwarming night out!

I think some of the best comedy works because of the pain that exists behind it. Comedy can be a wonderful tool to expose deeper truths, and this show has layers that hit many people on a deeper level. We often get audience members telling us they cried at certain moments in the piece. The show is built on a family suffering from grief and a lack of communication, an awkward trio who seem to have little in common trying to keep it together.

I have grown increasingly empathetic to Jade, my character, as she has developed. She is sulky, embarrassed and humorously ‘teenage’, but underneath it all is carrying a lot of guilt and pain. To feel misunderstood and trapped, to have suffered a great loss: this is human and deeply tragic. 

After our sell-out run at the Edinburgh Fringe last year, we spent a lot of time developing the show. Jade now performs a rap which explores “the patriarchal hegemonisation of society” as presented in Jurassic Park. She explains how the dinosaurs (all female) are a metaphor for patriarchal control and exploitation for financial gain. Beyond the laughs, people are savvy enough to know this speaks of something bigger, and the witty, feminist element to the piece is frequently picked out. Dinosaur Park is a comedy with a lot of meat in it!

We encountered many challenges when making this piece. How exactly do you show a T. Rex eating a man off a toilet seat? How do we do Spielberg’s work justice but also go in our own direction, and in so little time? Answers came from all directions and we are still learning.

Jurassic Park is a film with such a broad appeal. All kinds of lovely audience members have shared their experiences of watching our piece, sometimes offering their personal associations with the film and even revealing parallels between our show and their own family stories.

Dinosaur Park is at the Wardrobe Theatre from Monday, June 13 to Saturday, June 18. For more info and to book tickets, visit www.thewardrobetheatre.com/livetheatre/dinosaur-park-the-jurassic-parody