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Preview: Pterodactlys

In a cosy, wood-panelled nook of Magdalen College, five people move slowly around on the orders of director Kieron Ahem. Under his instruction, they gradually transform into the five members of the dysfunctional family whose interactions are plotted in Nicky Silver’s quirkily named production Pterodactyls. There’s something rather therapeutic about party group warm-ups, so I’m feeling pretty open-minded towards the small company when the acting starts. 

For a while, it’s unclear where small, flying dinosaurs come in. I watch a snippet of a scene in which daughter Emma (Ellie Lowenthal), introduces her new fiancé Tommy (Ali Leveret) to her mother Grace (Kaiya Stone). The two young lovers are full of fantastically mushy star-struckness: “Sometimes I say your name over and over again – no one can hear me but I don’t care”. They are saved only by their equally insistent status as hypochondriacs: “I’ve got this terrible toothache!”/“I’ve lost sensation in my hip”, which takes their mutual egocentricity by the hand and drags it into the realms of cynical humour.

The end of the scene is slightly flat, as he three sit in chairs and converse as though in a waiting room; I’m not sure what they might be waiting for, but a few more stage directions will iron this flaw in time for the opening night. The second scene, between father Arthur (Josh Dolphin) and son Todd (Tom Dowling), or “Buzzy” as his father insists on calling him, is more powerful. Arthur attempts to reminisce fondly about Todd’s young acting career in a school play – but it transpires that said play was Pinter’s The Birthday Party, and Todd played the rapist.For all Arthur’s insistence that Todd is “the most important person in the whole world”, there’s a tragic lack of communication between the two of them, probably not helped by the fact that Todd spends the majority of the scene on hands and knees messing around with a bag of bones.

That’s where the dinosaur comes in, by the way. As the household paraphernalia disappears throughout the play, Todd will apparently construct a dinosaur on stage. I daren’t ask what the dinosaur “means”, but I don’t think I need to. It’s probably one of those hugely symbolic structures best seen
first-hand.

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