The World According to Dinosaurs

A café.  A perfectly ordinary café.  Customers come and go.  Meanwhile, outside, the world is coming to an end – a sort of an end, a not-quite-the-end end.  In fact, according the V.O. Narrator, the world has already ended and what we’re seeing is a ‘story’ – and stories are vitally, crucially important in this play. 

So… At the café, the barista/boss is B (Belle Hansen).  The trainee barista-helper-dogsbody is A (Amelia Newman).  B – once wounded, now closes and in control - has to prod A to do their job because A is often distracted – thinking, speculating and imparting knowledge with a genuine sense of wonder but at some gushing length about dinosaurs, the T-Rex in particular, and the marvels of evolution. 

B is sarcastic, mocks A and wishes A would shut up.  Various members of the ensemble – all in identical striped jerseys and black trousers - arrive and depart, either singly as random characters, or all together for a dance number or a jungle rumble.  The stage can be crowded, full of people, or it’s near empty so A and B can get on with their bickering and their exchange of world views.

The play mixes genres, jumping from one set piece to another.  As well as A’s tale of the dinosaurs, we get a satirical take on late night talk shows and a game of ‘Who Am I?’  Or an account of the horrors at the bottom of the sea.  Or ‘The News’ – of disasters…  Much of the time, the play is or feels chaotic, as if writers Hansen and Newman made it up as they went along.  But there are jokes about inadequate research as if they are sending themselves up too.

If connections often feel very tangential, Hansen and Newman are serious; they have a point; indeed, they have a couple of points.  It’s just that one wonders whether they might they have made them better – that is, less randomly, and more pointedly, economically and coherently.  One of their points is, as it were, ‘fiddling while Rome burns’ – or dancing on the volcano.  I thought of Walt Kelley’s comic strip possum Pogo who tells the other creatures of the Okefenokee Swamp: ‘We have met the enemy and he is us.’  

At the same time, there are constant reminders that the end of the world may be the end of us but not the end of all…  Dinosaurs evolved into all kinds of birds, the ash cloud over the Amazon allowed flowers to develop and thus air for humans to breathe.  The V.O. Narrator gives us a useful, near exhaustive catalogue of periods, regimes, wars, and catastrophes that all began… and came to an end …and Life went on.  We can’t help thinking, however, that this time things may be different.  Or, in the world of this play, were different.

Director Cassandra Gray does a superb job with the differing performance personas of A and B – and with choreographing the disciplined ensemble (Izzy Patane, Matilda Gibbs, Anna Louey, Chris Patrick Hansen, Michael Cooper and Emily Pearson).  Changes of mood, or genre, or subject are nicely signalled by Theo Viney’s lighting and Jack Burmeister’s sound design keeps reminding us that the end is nigh. 

The play text, incidentally, indicates much more elaborate stage effects so that by the end the coffee shop – like the rest of the world – is a ruin and ‘has been fully reclaimed by Nature…’  Budget constraints probably prevented this, but the end is perfectly clear, leaving B and A alone in what looks and feels like the last light of a flickering fire.

Who are the dinosaurs?  No, not the inhabitants of Jurassic Park.  The dinosaurs are us, doomed to extinction like the dinosaurs of yore.  Well, not quite.  As back then, some smaller vestiges of the dinosaurs will survive to evolve into… who knows?  Yes, there will disappearances, destruction, suffering, and annihilation, but as for human beings, judging from those depicted here, no great loss. 

Thus The World According to Dinosaurs manages to be optimistic (if you take the long, philosophical view) and cynically pessimistic at the same time.  That the show remains entertaining and gets away with it is as much a tribute to Cassandra Gray’s direction as to Hansen and Newman’s iconoclastic, absurdist, genre hopping, anarchic scattergun humour.  

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Darren Gill

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