Dinosaurs - Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026

Dinosaurs is a surreal, deeply human exploration of what happens when trauma is repressed for too long. Claire comes home to find an actual dinosaur rummaging through her apartment, and rather than treating this extraordinary intrusion as something to be questioned, the play embraces it with the deadpan seriousness of an episode of The Twilight Zone. Mandy Rubeli plays Norma, the dinosaur, alongside Hailey Hudson as Claire, and it is this complete commitment to the absurdity of the premise that makes the show work.

The best science fiction has always understood that you do not need to explain the impossible for it to be believable. You simply accept it as reality and use it to tell a very human story. Dinosaurs does exactly that. The dinosaur becomes a physical manifestation of something Claire has spent 12 years trying not to confront, the unresolved trauma of being sexually assaulted as a 13 year old. If repression can alter your confidence, your ability to be affectionate, your relationships and your understanding of yourself, then perhaps it is not so strange that Claire’s buried trauma should reach back hundreds of millions of years.

What makes the concept particularly effective is the way the dinosaur becomes less a joke than a symbol of everything Claire has been unable to process. Her solution is seemingly simple: confront her abuser, find closure and send Norma back through time before the fabric of space-time collapses. 

There is something wonderfully strange about watching a woman going on a road trip with her best friend in an attempt to resolve years of trauma with a dinosaur by her side, yet Dinosaurs never lets the surreal premise overwhelm the emotional reality underneath it. The absurdity gives the play room to approach a difficult subject from an unexpected angle, while its straight-faced sci-fi treatment makes the impossible feel completely natural.

Lee Hutchison
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4/5

Runs until August 29th at Greenside Riddles Court