Hold on to your … what? Your enjoyment of this show may well depend on whether you recognise the title. Many will immediately recall a chain-smoking Samuel L Jackson uttering that warning of imminent jeopardy in Jurassic Park. Everybody else will be playing catch up as the 1993 dino saga is recreated with nerdy detail and velociraptor-like speed on a tiny stage using a budget more Scrooge than Spielberg.
Created by the US company Recent Cutbacks, it had a run this summer at the Edinburgh fringe where lo-fi pastiches of blockbusters have become a popular subgenre. Some, like Richard Marsh’s one-man Die Hard tribute Yippee Ki Yay, combine the retelling with new (in his case autobiographical) subplots. But this is a one-note spoof, the joke never amounting to much more than, say, depicting a triceratops with three party hats or substituting an open umbrella for a helicopter action sequence. At times the show gets bogged down – and confusing for Jurassic newbies – by rattling through plot points and minutiae from the movie rather than offering an extra dimension.
While these 75 minutes would be tighter at the standard fringe hour, Kristin McCarthy Parker’s production for over-eights is a lot of fun, partly because it is so evidently a labour of love. These film fans don’t just deliver Jurassic Park but also parody-trailers for other movies, their own Pearl and Dean homage and an act-out of the Universal logo. Foley artist Charlie Ives supplies sound effects with spoons and coat hangers, hums John Williams’s majestic score and voices a variety of guttural dino roars.
The parts are juggled at speed between Jack Baldwin and Laurence Pears. One role is represented by a little red necktie worn around a wrist; both Jeff Goldblum’s mathematician and Sam Neill’s palaeontologist are occasionally represented by merely their glasses. Goldblum’s contemplative, faintly quizzical drawl is accurately impersonated as he considers chaos theory and (a joke that could be tightened) the theory of Kaos’s cancellation by Netflix. Laura Dern’s palaeobotanist gets a bit left behind and both the title line and the film’s famous OTT toilet scene are thrown away (perhaps the latter is too ridiculous to spoof).
As on screen, the dinosaurs steal the show, rendered here with brilliant physical comedy. It takes two actors’ combined bodies to portray one of them; other species simply require wearing a cycle helmet and a traffic cone. If the audience participation could be more raucous, there’s some festive fun with the beasts’ jingle-bell roars to each other. It’s likely to be the only Christmas production where “it’s behind you!” refers to a voracious velociraptor.
• At Arcola theatre, London, until 11 January. Then touring until 16 April
