In a week when you can see the National Theatre’s runaway hit Dear England at the New Theatre, Sondheim’s classic musical Company at the Playhouse, and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in the Holywell Music Room, William Shakespeare’s Walking With Dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum is most definitely the odd one out.
If you didn’t catch it (and there was only one performance, so don’t go getting any ideas now) then you might be wondering what it was all about. Maybe some weird combination of Shakespeare and dinosaurs? Yep, absolutely right. Originally devised by Adam Lindholm, a palaeobiologist with a particular interest in vertebrate paleontology-macroecology-ichnology (and author of Persistent body size bias in the fossil record of Cenozoic North American mammals) it’s a charming, intellectual parlour piece that unites Adam’s academic work with his other passion: the Bard.
Proudly declaring that it’s here to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the BBC’s seminal series Walking With Dinosaurs two years too late, this cornucopia of cretaceous creatures lumbers into the lecture hall of the Oxford University Natural History Museum, and proceeds to perform scenes from The Tempest, King Lear and Hamlet as if all the characters were different kinds of dinosaur. The lecture hall isn’t the most naturally theatrical of spaces. For one thing, all the seats have tables in front of them for making notes, and the lights are on all the time (it’s a critic’s paradise). But what it lacks in stagecraft it more than makes up for in resources. If you’re going Jurassic, the NHM has the best scenery in Oxford. The stage is populated with actual dinosaurs: the models constructed by the legendary prop-maker Jez Harris, who left many of his spectacular creations to the museum.
The production stops short of animatronic reptiles speaking soliloquies. Instead, we have a group of black-clad actors performing in front of a projection screen with a kind of animated powerpoint showing each of the dinosaurs they represent. It works surprisingly well. The pictures are colourful and cuddly, like the sort of animals you might find in a 1990s educational video-game for pre-schoolers. And the choice of plays makes sense (in so far as anything makes sense when dinosaurs are doing Shakespeare): The Tempest, set in the Late Jurassic period, is a swampy island paradise whose lagoons teem with early life. King Lear… well, King Lear doesn’t make that much sense actually. And Hamlet brings the house down on the dino-dynasty, as a giant asteroid wipes them all out at the end. The characters are like a top ten list of all the greatest dinosaurs you’ve never heard of: Liopleurodon, Rhamphorhynchus, Tropeognathus, and no less than two Utahraptors. When a Horseshoe Crab put in a slightly halting performance which received a huge ovation from the audience for sheer courage, I was relieved just to see an animal I’d heard of.
Lindholm himself, Chorus-like, narrates the events in iambic pentameters that ape Shakespeare impressively and sneak in semi-quotes for the eagle-eared. And the cast of dinosaurs speak Shakespeare’s lines substituting Dino for Tudor terminology. ‘To claw or not to claw’, ponders one. ‘I die, I die, my femur’s cracked in twain’, groans another. It’s a series of gags (the same gag, to be fair), and the audience – containing more than a few palaeontologists no doubt – devoured them with joy like a T-Rex finishing off a duck-billed Edmontosaurus. And finally, Fortinbras arrived in the shape of a gigantic asteroid. Exeunt dinosaurs.
William Shakespeare’s Walking With Dinosaurs may be a bit of fun, but we should bear in mind that it celebrates something more significant than a bunch of modern palaeontologists amusing themselves in their spare time. It’s part of a lineage going back to Victorian times of British intellectuals entertaining each other with amateur performances. And as such, the Natural History Museum is the perfect location to see this eccentric, appealing tradition carry on. You can imagine Captain Scott and his scientists doing shows like this for each other in ice caves in the Antarctic, or British officers reciting their favourite Shakespearean speeches in the trenches of the Somme. They kept their spirits up not with phones but with education and wit. Granted, we aren’t trapped in the dark for nine months or being bombed by a distant enemy, but Adam Lindholm, in his nerdy, self-effacing and highly intelligent way, is reminding us that a little knowledge is a wonderful thing.