Logic and reason are torn to shreds in Tim Foley’s sharp, silly satire about fossils and fake news. Though it slightly overextends its central idea, Jurassic is a boxing match of a play, drawing the world’s current quality of political debate into a daft, furious comedy of dinosaurs and destruction.
Jay (Alastair Michael) loses his university job in the paleontology department because the new dean, whose name is actually Dean (Matt Holt), believes Jurassic Park is real. What use is a man who studies fossils of dinosaurs now they’ve got the real thing? As Jay tries not to pop a blood vessel while arguing against Dean’s obvious lunacy, this caustic play taps into the impossibility of winning an argument with someone who is playing by an entirely different set of rules.
From that daft base of illogic, the play snowballs. Dean uses disinformation to dismember the university in an effort to save costs and suppress freedom of thought, with Eleanor Ferguson’s cage-framed set nodding neatly to this ongoing dismantling. Holt is eye-clawingly infuriating as the humourless head, wilfully ignorant and blindingly literal. “Is this a bit?” Jay asks, when he’s first presented with Dean’s wild reasoning. “A bit of what?” Dean asks innocently. Events escalate when Jay stops clinging to reason and starts to play dirty, Michael playing him winningly as a desperate man with nothing left to lose.
Foley’s absurdly funny premise would work just as well with another cultural launchpad to display Dean’s ignorance; this type of conspiracy theorist, who makes up statements and calls them facts, is not limited by subject matter. But then we wouldn’t get director Piers Black’s delicious between-scene moments where the two men screech and claw at each other, necks taut and elbows outstretched. Two dinosaurs ready to rumble.
Reality bends as the story is hauled through to its logical extreme, where the drama stretches a little thin. There are only so many ways for the men to shout each other down and menacingly circle a desk. But the show never loses its dark comic bite or sharpened claws. Foley’s writing is a dotty delight and a searing indictment of the way our world is going.
At Soho theatre, London, until 29 November
