Dinosaur World Live is a chilling prophecy of climate disaster, or it might just be a fun kids’ show about some cool dino-puppets
Ostensibly a 50-minute long children’s show in which a series of realistically animated and life-size dinosaur puppets stomp around on stage, Dinosaur World Live at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre is, beneath the veneer of Jurassic spectacle, an unflinching treatise on the irreversible effects of climate change, and the energy industry’s plundering of the remaining fossil fuel resources of developing Polynesian nations.
Either that or it's a fun kids' show about cool dino-puppets.
We’re led on this journey into man’s hubris by the boisterous Miranda, an archaeologist and explorer returning from an island where dinosaurs survived their own global extinction event. She arrives carrying a football sized egg, and implores the audience of ecstatic three to ten year olds to shout her name if the egg begins to show signs of hatching. A cynical metaphor, surely, for the unacknowledged doomsaying of sidelined environmentalists.
When Brutus the triceratops slowly lumbers on to the stage (representing the incumbent and swollen inertia of Big Oil, probably), we’re taught the purpose of his impressive frill (protecting his vulnerable neck, that is the unionised labour force, maybe) and all about his iconic horns (the Holy Trinity of coal, gas and oil, one could only conclude).
By the time the star of the show – a gargantuan T-rex operated by three ace puppeteers – arrives on stage, the kids go ballistic and the case for policy change is well and truly made. The audience is invited to play with dinos after the event, and become complicit in the farce. Or it might just be a really fun family show about cool dinosaurs, who knows?