Preview: The Jurassic Parks, Wardrobe Theatre

This month at the Wardrobe Theatre sees a return for the acclaimed Superbolt Theatre and their sell-out, multi-award-winning spin on Spielberg’s Jurassic Park – an epic adventure of show-stopping, spine-tingling theatrics and megalithic mayhem.

Welcome to the unlikely setting of Lyme Regis Community Centre, where the Park Family – Terry, Jade and Noah – embark on a journey to a misty past. Where, when things go wrong, family feuds are faced with the rapturous roar of DIY dinosaurs. This laugh-out-loud take on Spielberg’s classic is a theatrical celebration of cinematic nostalgia and a powerful reminder of the ones we love.

Here are Superbolt’s Maria Askew, Frode Gjerløw and Simon Maeder to tell us more.

Tell us about Superbolt and the kinds of stories you like to tell.
We founded Superbolt in 2011 after finishing our training at Jacques Lecoq Theatre School in Paris. We’ve toured internationally, from the US to Australia, to all kinds of venues and festivals, the Edinburgh Fringe and beyond.
We love to tell original, fun, quirky stories with heart. Every piece we’ve made is different, but they all involve a lot of comedy and are made up of multiple elements, such as music, dance and physical storytelling. We often perform characters who are very playful and have a lot they want to share with the audience! We try to be as inventive as possible with our staging – we’d rather rely on our bodies than an elaborate set. We use simple props in creative and surprising ways.

Superbolt’s Simon Maeder and Frode Gjerløw in ‘The Jurassic Parks’. All pics: Mihaela Bodlovic

All our shows deal with some aspect of what it means to be human. Themes include home, identity, technology, friendship and belonging. We’ve found our shows attract all kinds of audiences and we love the way it brings people together! People come along ready to laugh, but they are also moved to tears and invited to get lost in thought, which can be a nice surprise for them! We work on that knife-edge between ridiculous comedy and domestic tragedy and it’s an exciting space to be in!
For example, The Jurassic Parks is seemingly a theatrical re-telling of Spielberg’s classic, but you actually get a whole lot more than you bargained for…

L-R Simon Maeder, Maria Askew, Frode Gjerløw

How did The Jurassic Parks come together? Out of what meetings, experiences, long-time obsessions…?
Well, we decided we wanted to stage an action film of some kind and we soon settled on Jurassic Park. We knew that transforming an epic Hollywood blockbuster into a three-person, lo-fi performance would require a lot of ingenuity. We’re all very fond of Jurassic Park, which we all grew up watching.
This connection to our own childhoods links to the other key aspect of our show: its characters. We decided early on that we also wanted to make this a play about a family, and all its difficulties, so our storytellers are a dysfunctional family from Lyme Regis, on the Jurassic coast. Once we had decided on the film and our key characters, the rest unfolded pretty organically.

You’ve created a show, ostensibly about dinosaurs but also that (clearly) packs quite an emotional punch. How?
Our show has dinosaurs and Jurassic fandom, yes, but really it is more about how a film (or indeed a show!) can bring people together. It is about a family working through differences and discovering that, as Jeff Goldblum puts it, life finds a way…

The scenario is tragicomic: Terry and his two teenage children Jade and Noah are holding a memorial screening of Jurassic Park in Lyme Regis Community centre, in honour of the children’s mother Madelaine, a paleontologist, who passed away the year before.
The family is fractured, the event is dubious, but the stakes are high. So when they discover their precious Jurassic Park VHS tape has gone missing, something needs to be done… so they begin to perform the film themselves for the gathered mourners. This is spliced with flashbacks that reveal the family’s own complicated history. The stories weave in and out from present to past and back again, as dinosaurs blur with domestic drama.
Given that description, it is odd how well it works!

The Jurassic Parks is at the Wardrobe Theatre from Apr 2-13. For more info, visit thewardrobetheatre.com/livetheatre/the-jurassic-parks

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