A hilariously unhinged academic turf war where dinosaurs, egos, and alternative facts collide.
Jurassic, written by Tim Foley and produced by Ransack Theatre, is currently running in Soho Theatre’s Upstairs Studio. A sharp, absurd, and strangely familiar battle for power unfolds in Jurassic, set in a deliberately minimal university office: a table, a few chairs (later sold off to patch the budget, never to return), and a wall of resolutely closed blinds. Around the edges, lurk plastic plants and working lights – an aesthetic that sits somewhere between Jurassic Park gift-shop ambience and a sterile HR department. It’s a visual joke that becomes a thematic one: bureaucracy meets fantasy, and neither quite wins.
The premise is brilliantly ridiculous. A newly appointed Dean – whose name is, un/helpfully, also Dean – decides to fire the entire palaeontology department after watching Jurassic Park and mistaking it for a documentary. His logic: dinosaurs are back, so the field is redundant. That, and the university coffers are running dry. From there, the play spirals into a territorial conflict where logic is optional, and ego is absolutely not.
What’s impressive is how well the production handles this escalation. The direction by Piers Black is dynamic and engaging, leaning into abstraction without losing clarity: power shifts are staged physically and creatively, becoming increasingly detached from naturalism as the story evolves. Darkness is used to sharpen tension; in one scene a single working light expresses, both comically and with genuine stakes, the characters’ struggle for control. The performers move with confidence through the space, testing its edges, and their transitions into dinosaur physicality between scenes – curated by movement director Yandass Ndlovu – are absurd, committed, and very funny. Black’s choices in the studio space are elegant and confident.
Foley’s writing is slick, tight, unexpectedly layered and tonally complex in its satire. Beneath the comedy sits something recognisable: entitlement, insecurity, institutional rot, and the stubborn refusal to let the truth interfere with a personal narrative. It’s funny, yes, sharply so, but there’s discomfort built into its humour. Anyone who has ever worked under a misguided boss (or been one, I suppose) will wince in recognition.
The two-person cast of Matt Holt and Alastair Michael is excellent. Their dynamic is chaotic, electric, and at times almost unbearably tense. Neither is sympathetic enough to root for, but both are compelling enough that you stay locked inside their twisted logic. The script gives them flaws and contradictions, and the actors commit to them fully – vanity, rage, incompetence, desperate need – all bristling in the space.
The sound design by Anna Short and Patch Middleton elevates the world. The Jurassic Park motif threads through a later scene alongside the Countdown theme, distorted beyond comfort yet retaining humour beside horror. Designed by Catja Hamilton, lighting shifts subtly as the tone grows stranger, and the once rigid office set becomes unexpectedly expressive, devolving alongside these men.
What emerges is a world teetering between credibility and unreality, a knife-edge the show balances with surprising control. Themes of belief, misinformation, personal mythology, and the weaponisation of process sit beneath the absurd premise, feeling relevant and fresh. The escalation is paced well, just about keeping us as the audience on board. By the time the story reaches its ending, which is unexpected and strangely liberating, the play has stretched its reality just far enough to joyfully allow it despite the leap.
Jurassic is hilarious, unsettling, and sharply contemporary: a battle not just about dinosaurs, but about whose version of reality gets to win. A joyful, exasperating, and painfully recognisable duel where no one deserves victory, and yet the fight continues inevitably.