I have come to the realisation that I’m suffering from Stockholm syndrome.

I love dinosaurs, but I never wanted to love dinosaurs. In fact, I went through a period of hating them, resenting them, and blaming them for my captivity. I was held hostage by dinosaurs for a long time before they wore me down. I was bombarded every night with relentless non-fiction, chosen by my youngest son for his bedtime story. Page after page of paleontological facts so mind-numbing that I would stare longingly at Thomas the Tank Engine’s Birthday Surprise and long for the chance to impersonate Gordon the Big Engine again.

I was subjected to psychological torture thanks to reruns of the BBC’s Walking with Dinosaurs. I was interrogated about the minutiae of fossils, landscapes, and food chains. My answers were never good enough, possibly because I made them up. And so the advert for Dinosaur World Live, served up by a social media algorithm, should have set my eye twitching. Nope. I was convinced we absolutely had to go, and that it would be brilliant. I was right.

You see, the show encapsulates how dinosaurs eventually won me over. They’re very clever (the team behind Dinosaur World Live, I mean, not dinosaurs – although to be fair, some of them were). The prehistoric world is unfathomable to us in so many ways, and yet it’s what our world once was – it’s so remote, but it’s in the roots of our existence. I wonder if this is part of the appeal and explains why children in particular love all things prehistoric. There’s a fantastical, mythical quality to it, and yet kids understand that these things really did exist and everything we know about them is based on, as my son would say, ‘real science facts’. Dinosaurs are the real-world version of dragons and unicorns, and children can’t get enough of them. Judging by the audience’s reaction to this production at Sheffield Lyceum, they can keep touring this one until the Mesozoic cows come home (that’s Nigersaurus, for the unenlightened).

There wasn’t much of a compelling narrative arc, but we’re talking about Tyrannosaurus Rex here, not Oedipus Rex. The puppet handlers, or ‘wranglers’ as the main character Miranda called them, were phenomenally impressive. I think that most of the grown-ups in the audience spent their time marvelling at this, while the children were so mesmerised by the dinosaurs that they forgot the people were even there. I thought that Miranda, played by Lizzie Burder, was so brave. Not so much for sharing a stage with a giant T. rex (although I did enjoy an allusion to a woman having her arm eaten at the Scarborough show) but there was a huge amount of audience participation, including several kids called up on stage to ‘help’ with various dinosaur-husbandry tasks. There were countless ways in which this could have gone quite spectacularly wrong, and yet it was completely seamless.

Props to the props team – the dinosaurs were stunning and, importantly, didn’t exact any criticism from my hawk-eyed six-year-old for inaccuracy. Steven Spielberg could learn a thing or two from these guys. So, if like me, you have a toxic love/hate relationship with your cretaceous captors, lean into it. Go see Dinosaur World Live and admit that you love these magnificent beasts really, even if they have fossilised your brain.

By Amy Stone, Sheffield Correspondent

Main image: credit Pamela Raith

 

Dinosaur World Live